—
Ajay slid the last box across the floor, landing it precisely in the only gap in a long row of boxes stacked neatly against the back wall of the circular tower room.
He closed his eyes, put his hands to either side of his skull, and pressed gently. This seemed to help alleviate the pressure that built up during these extensive memorization sessions. Unfortunately, it did nothing for the even sharper headaches that sometimes woke him in the middle of the night.
You’re building new neural pathways at extraordinary rates of speed and density. That’s how Dr. Kujawa had described the phenomenon to him after the tests they’d recently run. And “pathways” doesn’t begin to do this process justice; you’re building superhighways.
When Ajay looked in a mirror recently, he’d noticed his eyes appeared to have grown larger. His pupils had also become less sensitive to light, almost as if he welcomed it now, because it allowed him to keep them open wider and longer and to see more. He found that he was hungry to see more. Most alarming of all, the last time he’d tried on an old baseball cap, the fit was decidedly tighter than he remembered.
He’d decided it was best not to think too much about these things.
Ajay looked at his watch, then hurried to the east-facing window. He peered down at the path leading toward the shore past the graveyard and quickly spotted two figures moving along:
Will and Mr. Elliot.
Ajay widened his eyes, focusing in on them as he’d learned to do, details accumulating and enhancing the image.
He saw Will glance back toward the tower, reach his arm back, and raise it behind the older man.
Two fingers.
“Good golly, Miss Molly,” whispered Ajay in alarm.
He quickly moved to retrieve the knapsack he’d hidden in one of the boxes. Looked at his watch again: 6:50. Ten minutes before Lemuel Clegg would arrive to bring him his dinner.
He removed his small school pager from the bag. The one he’d modified to avoid detection by the school’s server network.
—
“Sensing that he might be less receptive to the actual narrative, Lemuel Cornish never told Thomas about what his father and the Knights had found down here,” said Franklin as the doors slid open again. “My father never heard a word about it.”
Franklin led Will out of the elevator into a narrow corridor. They hadn’t descended all the way to the bottom. This was a level Will had never seen before, built in a style decades newer than the ones in the old hospital, freshly painted, with portraits on the wall, men in nineteenth- and twentieth-century dress who he assumed must have been prominent members of the Knights.
“What kind of a man was he?” asked Will.
“Lemuel? Practical. Levelheaded. He understood only too well how his father had lost his way. That Ian’s obsession with what he’d uncovered under these grounds owed more to passion, or madness, than reason. You see, after his initial enthusiasm, Ian gradually became convinced that he’d made a dreadful mistake, that this lost city needed to be sealed off, buried for all time.”
“I take it Lemuel didn’t see things the way his father did,” said Will.
“He was a much more balanced man. Lemuel adopted a curious but cautious approach to the ongoing investigations. It was his idea, for instance, to install those great wooden doors at the mouth of the tunnel. Not to seal anything off, although he let his father believe that was the reason, but simply to prevent any unwanted or accidental entrance.”
“Do you know who carved those words on them—Cahokia and Teotwawki?”
“We don’t know exactly when he put the first one there, but we believe carving those words on his son’s doors was among the last things Ian Cornish ever did.”
“But why did he call it Cahokia? You know about the one in southern Illinois, right?”
“Oh, yes, the Native American archaeological site. Vast mounds of earth, laden with artifacts, evidence of an earlier civilization. French explorers stumbled onto it over three hundred years ago. It’s a state park now, complete with guided tours and a souvenir shop, although it wasn’t anything close to that organized back in Ian’s day.
“But after he paid a visit there, Ian apparently came to believe that his discovery here and that one to the south were part of the same vast underground network of cities. Not a Native American one, mind you, but an even older civilization that the Others constructed long ago beneath the entire Midwest. A conclusion that, in Ian’s declining mental state, he believed supported the idea that they had once been Earth’s dominant species. Which he in turn interpreted”—he paused and chuckled as he turned to Will with a twinkle in his eye—“as evidence of their desire to take over the world a second time.”
“So that’s what the second word on the door is about, then,” said Will. “You know what that one means, right?”
“Teotwawki. Oh, yes, an acronym: the end of the world as we know it. More ravings, but sadly, so it proved to be for Ian. At that point, he had been confined for some months to a padded room here at the Crag, judged a danger to himself. Then he escaped one day and fled down into the tunnels. That’s when he carved those letters on the doors with a knife he stole from the kitchen. And then Ian used that same knife to take his own life.”
Will paused for a moment. He’d stood in that exact spot, not so long ago. He closed his eyes, sent himself back there, and for a moment touched the overwhelming aura of the poor man’s terror and desperation. He shuddered as it ran through him; then he quickly shook it off.
“What about the statues of the soldiers in the tunnel? Did Ian put those there, too?”
“Yes, another folly of Ian’s that Lemuel tolerated enough to indulge, even after his father was gone—one soldier for every American war. Sentinels, Ian called them, standing guard against what he feared might one day emerge from down below. I hope you can see by now that poor Ian had some exceedingly strange ideas about what he’d found. But he’d also grown far too unstable to come close to realizing exactly who he’d found.”
“But Lemuel did.”
“Oh, yes. And he was also perceptive enough to realize that in order to make the most of it, the Knights would need the help of someone in our family going forward. An ally from the next generation who would appreciate the magnitude, dare I say the magnificence, of what all this could lead to.” Franklin glanced over and smiled at Will again. “That’s why he came to me.”
“But you were just a student here then, weren’t you?” asked Will, confused.
“I was twelve,” said Franklin.
He stopped before a set of double doors and took out the porcelain key.
“But you see, I was very much like you, Will. I’d discovered the tunnels during my own explorations when I was still in short pants. A boy needs his adventures, doesn’t he?”
“I guess so, sir.”
“And not unlike Ian Cornish, I found that something down in those caverns spoke to me as well. Not a voice, per se, but a feeling, an emanation that radiated intelligence, mystery, and the promise of something titanic. It was irresistible to my imagination. So I kept venturing back down below, a little deeper each time, until I finally made it to the doors. And that day, as I emerged from the tunnels, I found Lemuel waiting for me.”
“Was he angry at you?”
Franklin chuckled. “He tried to make me think so. But after we spoke for a while, he sensed we were kindred spirits. My curiosity was handsomely rewarded. Lemuel began taking me along with him on his trips down below—beyond the doors—showing me, a section at a time, the enormity of what they’d found.”
“You never told your father about this?”
“It was a secret only Lemuel and I shared,” said Franklin, raising his eyebrows mischievously. “Just as all this will be ours.”
He inserted the key into a large rectangular keyhole and turned it. Will heard the lock yield, and Franklin softly pushed the doors open.
A dimly lit carpeted room waited inside. Sleek,
spare furnishings, a few expensive-looking works of modern art on the wall. Two leather wing-backed chairs.
Someone was sitting in one of the chairs, turned away from the door; Will saw a thick-soled, old-fashioned black shoe splayed out to the side on the floor but couldn’t see the person’s face.
“Until one day Lemuel asked me to share our secret with one of Father’s colleagues, a faculty member here at the Center, one of my instructors, who’d also taken an interest in me. A man who they knew would appreciate what they’d discovered even better than I.
“You see, Will, from our inception in antiquity, the Knights have excelled at conducting what we would call today ‘deep background’ on people who are of interest to us. And they couldn’t have been more right about this man, or me, for that matter, or the whole situation. It’s no exaggeration to say that this pairing became the turning point in our history.”
Franklin walked into the room. A sickly sour smell hung in the air, medicinal and threaded with a hint of rot. Will felt a shiver of fear root him to the floor. He forced his legs to carry him forward after his grandfather, toward the man in the chair.
“I’d like you to meet him, too, Will,” said Franklin, turning to face him once he reached the other side of the chair.
Will saw an ancient hand rise from the arm of the chair to beckon him closer. Sallow skin hung off the bones, spidery fingers trembled as they waved, fingernails looked like thick yellowed talons.
“Will…this is my mentor, Dr. Joseph Abelson.”
When Will finally saw the man’s face, he nearly keeled over.
—
The pager buzzed quietly in Nick’s pocket as he reached for a water bottle. Screened by the fridge’s open door, he quickly slipped out the device and glanced at the message screen.
Go time.
“Holy crapanoly,” whispered Nick.
He dropped the pager back in his pocket and took a deep breath as he unscrewed the top of the water bottle. He took a small vial from his other pocket and unscrewed the top. He squeezed the rubber stopper on top, filling it, then drew out the glass vial and squeezed again, emptying the colorless contents of the vial into the water. Nick replaced the cap, pocketed the vial, and grabbed another bottle for himself.
“Here you go, Brooks.”
Brooke never looked up as Nick set the bottle of water down on the table in front of her, took a seat across from her, cracked open his own bottle, and drained half of it in a single swig.
“Hot enough for ya?” he asked, then belched.
She finally looked up at him. “If I offer to pay you, will you go away? I can afford it.”
“Come on, you oughta know me better than that,” said Nick, finishing his bottle in another epic swig. “How much?”
Brooke scowled at him, reached for her water bottle, and looked back at her book. Nick watched carefully as she unscrewed the top, then paused as she finished reading something.
Like he’d seen his friends do, he closed his eyes and tried to send a thought suggestion to her: Drink.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah, perfect, why?” asked Nick, reopening his eyes.
“Your face was all screwed up, like a baby trying to poop.”
Brooke took a long sip of water while slowly shaking her head.
Awesome. The mind thing totally worked. Or maybe she’s just thirsty.
“I was just trying to think,” said Nick.
“I forgot—for you, that’s cardio.”
He glanced at his watch.
Seven minutes. That’s how long it’s supposed to take before it affects the nervous system.
“I’m gonna hit the shower,” he said.
“Thanks ever so much for the update,” said Brooke, turning away, her face buried back in her book as she took another sip.
Once he was behind his locked bathroom door, Nick answered Ajay’s page with one of his own.
Done.
WILL’S RULES FOR LIVING #2:
YOU CAN’T LIVE YOUR LIFE TWO DAYS AT A TIME.
“Dr. Abelson, this is the young man I’ve been telling you about,” said Franklin, smiling, raising his voice well above a conversational level. “My grandson, Will.”
The man’s right eye was opaque with milky cataracts. The other had a cold reptilian blankness to it. Wisps of hair clung to his head like cotton candy. The flesh of his face sagged like it was trying to slide off his skull, and the runoff collected in a wrinkled puddle below his chin.
Abelson extended his right hand, mottled and covered with scabs, the fingers bent and twisted like broken twigs. Will reached out and took it. Dry and scaly to the touch, it felt more like a claw.
Will quickly calculated:
This is my grandfather’s mentor. My grandfather’s at least ninety-five. So somehow Dr. Joseph Abelson—a man who was a contemporary and colleague of Adolf Hitler’s—can’t be a day less than a hundred and fifteen…and maybe even a whole lot older than that.
As Abelson stared at him, a long, dry rasp escaped the man’s throat, an attempt at speech that didn’t sound like words.
“He says you look like your father,” said Franklin with a little chuckle.
And you look like a mummy, thought Will.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” said Will, raising his voice to match his grandfather’s level and drawing his hand back.
“As I believe you know, none of the first class of Paladins perished on that ‘plane crash’ we arranged in ’38,” said Franklin, then patted Abelson on the arm. “And neither did our teacher. He came back to supervise the program, in the hospital the Knights built for us down below, which you’ve also seen.”
Will couldn’t take his eyes off Abelson, who continued to gaze at him with that one unsettling red-rimmed eye. No sense of what he was thinking or feeling registered; that eye looked dead, and his slack face seemed incapable of forming any expression at all.
You’re not the only one who can mask his feelings, thought Will as he turned back to his grandfather.
“You weren’t even on the plane,” said Will.
“No, my father had seen to that—after the interference of his meddlesome friend Henry Wallace. He packed me off to Europe for a few months, and so I missed being part of the program.”
“Lucky for you,” said Will.
The memory of those pathetic, malformed creatures writhing around, wasting away in the copper tanks down below came to mind. For the last seventy-five years.
Will closed his eyes and shuddered.
“Yes, well, we all knew the risks,” said Franklin, untroubled. “Those boys all volunteered with open hearts, and not one of them has said they ever regretted it.”
Not according to Happy Nepsted, thought Will.
“And although my father had prevented me from participating initially, when I returned to school, the Knights still found a crucial role for me. Can you guess what it was?”
“You were the control group,” said Will.
“Precisely, Will. Every worthwhile scientific inquiry requires a baseline to chart any changes in the study group against, and that assignment fell to me.”
“But wasn’t your father watching you like a hawk, afraid you’d fall back in with them?”
Abelson gave out a small, wheezy gasp and Will realized it might have been a laugh. That’s how Franklin seemed to interpret it, and he smiled in response.
“Not during the war years,” said Franklin. “Father was far too preoccupied, like the rest of the country. Fighting Fascism, Nazis. Making America ‘safe.’ Not to mention Father really did believe he’d already expunged the Knights from the Center for good.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t give him any reason to think otherwise.”
“Exactly. I played the perfect choirboy. The next challenge we faced was of our own making. By the time the war was over, as a number of unfortunate issues with the health of our first group began to surface, we’d realized the protocols for th
e Paladin program would require extensive…fine-tuning.”
Abelson raised a finger and his tongue rolled around as he issued a few more unintelligible rattles and hisses in Franklin’s direction.
Franklin leaned down to listen. “That’s right, Dr. Joe,” he said, then, interpreting again for Will, “Back to the drawing board indeed.”
Franklin moved to an opaque curtain covering a space on the wall the size of a medium window.
“But this time we’d found a whole new level of inspiration. You see, by then we’d established stronger and more reliable contact with our…new friends from down below, on the other side of the divide.”
“But how?” asked Will as he walked over to join his grandfather. “They were all dead by then, weren’t they, or banished there—”
“Dead, certainly not, but banished?” Franklin chortled again. “That’s only what those preposterous do-gooders who put them there have convinced themselves to believe.” He looked at Will sharply. “And you do know who I’m referring to, don’t you?”
Will knew he was on dangerous ground here; he tried to maintain a delicate balance of skepticism and light contempt in his response. “I heard they call themselves the Hierarchy. Are those the ones you mean?”
“Exactly so.”
“I didn’t know they were real.”
“Oh, they’re real, all right, sorry to say, and full of more self-righteous arrogance and delusional grandeur than you could possibly imagine.”
“Who are they?”
“Like our friends, older beings. Far older, from some other realm beyond our imagining, or perhaps, as they claim—I’ll reserve my skepticism—advanced souls who’ve evolved beyond the indignities of physical life on Earth into a more exalted existence. And I suppose it is possible that at one time, in distant ages past, they did serve a useful function for this Earth. Who’s to say? Maybe for a period of time they faithfully fulfilled that purpose.
“But once our friends developed into something like their equals, I believe the Hierarchy’s pride got the better of them. Instead of celebrating them as peers, they perceived the Others as rivals, and from that moment on, these fools forfeited any claim on their former role as “benign protectors.” After that, they engaged in a genocidal crusade to thwart a magnificent race of beings that was guilty of nothing more than realizing its destiny. Which culminated in the Hierarchy’s tragic decision to ‘banish’ the brightest light this world had yet produced.”