Chapter 13 - The Terrors
As soon as Lilian received a texted confirmation from Ridley that Fiela was contracted to be Ben’s protector, she summoned the limousine and the three of them rode to the airport.
During the ride, Fiela drank a fifth of a bottle of bourbon from the wet bar. The three of them talked about a variety of unimportant topics, to include where, exactly, the Peth had obtained the schoolgirl’s uniform. The increasingly slurred explanation, which was essentially that a certain prep school girl Fiela had encountered needed to be taught a lesson on good behavior, was as predictable as Fiela’s assurance that said girl wasn’t hurt, not really, or at least not permanently, or at least not in any significant way, of that even if she was, the girl had it coming.
When Fiela had completed her story, Lilian said, “You must behave now, Sister. There can be no such antics from this point forward.”
“I know,” the Peth hiccupped.
“That means you cannot enter Ben’s room tonight.”
“My room?” asked Ben, suddenly uneasy. “Why would she do that?”
The girl looked displeased. “But I am his guardian.”
“I understand that, but there is no contract. Appearances are everything.”
“Who would know?” Fiela pressed.
Lilian looked at Ben and said, “We must be careful. Should there be any slip-ups tonight you would be cast out of the Nisirtu and prevented from studying the tablets.” Looking back at Fiela, she said, “No one may enter his room tonight for any reason. Besides, Ben has been through a lot these past twenty-four hours. He needs to rest.”
“So? Can we not rest together?” The girl suddenly grimaced. “I don’t feel so good…” she said, covering her mouth and burping. She fell over in her seat, her head landing in Ben’s lap. Her eyes shut, she mumbled, “Shall I not protect you tonight, Ben?”
In spite of his libido’s desperate assurances that all cylinders were firing properly for whatever Fiela might attempt, the man knew that Lilian was right. He was exhausted and there was a pretty good chance that he’d pass out as soon as he went horizontal, regardless of the stimuli.
“I am tired,” he said, thinking of the tablets and his bank account.
“Fine,” the Peth whispered. A moment later, her head still in his lap, she began snoring.
Lilian pulled from her purse a manila envelope and handed it to Ben, “I’d like you to do a cursory review of these documents tonight, please.”
Ben peered inside the envelope. It contained several documents of approximately a dozen pages stapled at the corners. He withdrew them. The top page of each document contained thousands of densely packed triangles, squares, lines, and symbols that resembled asterisks.
He looked up at Lilian, one eyebrow arched. “These look like the characters on the signet ring. They look like Cuneiform, but not exactly.”
Lilian nodded. “They are Cuneiform-Nouveau. We refer to it as just Cuneiform or Noveau.
“The language, then? Agati?”
“That’s right. Each of the documents has an English translation attached at the back.”
Ben flipped to the translation at the back of the first document. The paragraph at the top read:
[START BASTION SCENARIO, VARIANT QQ6] 5K WHPB. R.W.F./press/ to query about Chinese military advisors in West Africa. WHPS: U.S. views presence as destabilization of region. [RR894] PRC to respond 2330Z Advisors have decreased terrorism threat in region/are stabilizing influence [RR899] French P.M. to rebut Chinese claims 0830Z plans to send advisors to former colonies to counter Chinese influence. [RR914] U.S.S. CV GEORGE WASHINGTON - Start ENG RM FIRE, REDIRECT JAPAN. [RS442V2] PRC CV TO SPRAT ISLG…
The remaining pages, though distinct in content were identical in form. Alarmed, he said, “Lilian, these look intercepts of government or military transmissions.”
She said, “I assure you they are not. The events described in those documents have not occurred yet. This is a script.”
Ben gave her a hard look. “You’re telling me that the events contained in these documents are planned?”
“Correct. I’m giving you this script tonight so that you may verify the required events have occurred tomorrow. I hope that will convince you that I am not lying about the Nisirtu and its capabilities. I have provided you with a good cross-section of scripted events. Military movements, assassinations, government proclamations, and so forth.”
The researcher wasn’t sure what to say. This was taking the Nisirtu fantasy to a different and disturbing realm. At any rate, he expected that most of what was contained in the documents was probably so vaguely written that it could be interpreted a million ways. Wasn’t that how the trick worked?
Still, there was that reference to a fire aboard the Washington…
…which Lilian will explain away when it doesn’t happen, Ben decided. Perhaps there will be a news story about a British cruiser with mechanical problems or a Russian freighter that sank and she will tell him that the ‘plan’ had changed, but didn’t the script predict that a large ship would have a problem that would be in the news?
Yes, that’s exactly what would happen. It was an age-old game which he had no intention of playing.
He was, at any rate, too exhausted to read through all the documents. They appeared to be half-gibberish and he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open. When they arrived at Steepleguard, Ben, weary to the core, gave both women polite kisses, wandered up to his room and unceremoniously collapsed onto his bed.
Sleep came immediately, and much later, the terrors.
Lilian held her violin.
“Ben, I’d like to introduce you to a few friends,” she said.
Ben stepped onto the creaky wooden floors of the room, which looked something like Lilian’s music room at her mansion, except that algae-coated obelisks had replaced the walls. Sitting upon a faded red settee were a man and woman of advanced years. The man wore black wool suit and a red-banded hat of a kind popular in the 1940’s. He was small and the skin above his starched collar was dry and peeling. The woman wore a black wool dress and around her neck several strings of the largest pearls Ben had ever seen. She was bald. Both had murky gray eyes. They were stone faced and nodded as a unit when he approached.
“A pleasure to meet you both,” said Ben, not extending his hand because he did not want to touch them. There was an unpleasant smell in the air. The room smelled like - what, dirt?
A film of water covered the floor.
“Ben,” said the man in a raspy, pack-a-day voice. “Ridley has told me about you.”
“Yes,” said the ancient, bald woman, not looking at him.
“I am Douglas Carter. This is Eleanor Dembrowski.”
Putting his hands in his pockets, Ben looked at Lilian, expecting her to say something, but she was looking at the floor, her violin dangling at her side. She seemed oddly detached.
Ben said, “Have you come far?”
“Oh yes,” said the ancient woman. “Quite far.”
“Quite far,” agreed the man.
“Where are you from?”
The woman said, “An island. In the Pacific. You’ve never heard of it. It’s remote and practically a wilderness. We got it when the war ended.”
“You live there alone?”
“Oh, we don’t live there,” said the man. “It’s where we’re from.”
The woman said, “Lilian, you’ll play for us.”
Lilian put the violin to her shoulder and wordlessly complied. As she played a gray tentacle curled up one of the obelisks and became taut, as if the thing it was attached to was preparing to pull itself up from the depths.
“Well,” said Ben, noting that no one else in the room seemed bothered by the giant slimy appendage, “where do you live now?”
“We’re retired. We move around,” said the woman.
“We go where we’re needed,” said the man.
Ben said, “A working retirement? What di
d you do before?”
“We were astrologists,” the two said in unison.
Ben began to slowly retreat. Everything felt wrong. Very, very wrong. “Astrology…interesting.”
“Yes, it is the noblest of sciences,” the woman said.
“Do you want to know why we retired?” asked the old man with an evil grin. His teeth were brown and rotting.
“Um, sure,” replied Ben.
The ancient woman rasped, “There was no future in it!”
She then burst into laughter. It was the laughter of the insane, a high-pitched cackle that went on and on. Lilian began to play her violin faster and louder, torturing the instrument. Her music, like the woman’s laugh, was nothing but screeching madness.
Ben turned to run and saw the eye of the thing from below in front of him, yellow and mindless and evil.
“There’s no future in it, human! No future!” screeched the couple.
Ben felt the tentacle around his legs as Lilian dropped her violin and jumped into the abyss.
“Good to meet you, Ben!” yelled the man in the hat as blood poured from the orifices that had once been his eyes. “Don’t be a stranger!”
“Ben!”
Ben jerked awake just in time to hear his last pathetic, cowardly moan. He opened each eye one millimeter. It was still dark. A dream, he realized. Was the voice a dream, too?
“Ben! It’s me!”
Committing, he opened both eyes and propped himself up on one elbow. Though the room was unlit, the figure in the doorway was silhouetted by ambient light from the hallway. Ben couldn’t see her face, but he knew the skirt and knee socks and, without a doubt, the voice.
“Fiela, what are you doing here?”
“I was walking by your room and I heard you screaming.”
Ben groaned, retrieved his phone from the nightstand and looked at the time. “You were walking by the door to my room at three thirty in the morning?”
She was slow to respond. “I wanted to make sure you were safe.”
“You haven’t been sitting in front of my door all evening, have you?”
She didn’t answer. Ashamed and humiliated that she had witnessed his outburst, even indirectly, he said, “It was a nightmare. I’m fine. Go to bed.”
Fiela took a single tentative step into the room. “It wasn’t a nightmare. It was a night terror. I can tell.” She paused and said, “I have them, too. Do you have medicine for them?”
He let out a loud breath. “I did, once. Not anymore.”
“Oh,” she said meekly, sounding disappointed. “Anyway, I should stay with you.”
“Fiela, we can’t…I mean, Lilian was pretty clear about that.”
“I know. But can I just stay here with you?”
Ben sighed and wiped the sleep from the corners of his eyes. He suspected that if he didn’t allow her into the room she would spend the rest of the evening sitting in the hallway. “You’ll behave?”
“Will you?”
She’s got you there, Ben. “Yes,” he said, forcing the word from his mouth like a wad of cotton.
The girl closed the door behind her and moved briskly to the bed, a wraith in the darkness. He heard metallic clanks on the far nightstand. A gun, he imagined. Or a knife. Or both. The possibilities with this girl were endless, really.
“Lilian will find out about this and she’s going to get the wrong idea,” he said.
“She probably already knows. Anyway, we’ll both be good, right?”
“Right.”
“I’ll just lie down next to you and watch the door.”
“Do as you like.”
He felt the mattress bouncy gently up and down and listened to a prolonged shuffling noise.
“Fiela, are you taking off your clothes?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t see why that’s necessary.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, and slipped nude beneath the sheets and wiggled backwards until she was against him.
“You can put your arm around me,” she said as if she were grudgingly conceding to an unspoken demand. “On top of the sheet, though.”
“Probably better if I don’t,” he countered.
“It’s okay,” she said with less bravado. “I get them, too. The terrors. I don’t mind.”
“You have nightmares?”
“Terrors,” she corrected him. Then, she began to speak with urgency, the words spewing out of her. “Every night, truly! Every night. You get sweaty, right? And it gets hard to breathe sometimes, and your friends from the war come back to visit you, but they’re dead and they’re not your friends anymore, and sometimes your family comes back, especially your mother…”
She slowed and said quietly, “And they point their fingers at you and they’re mad at you but you don’t know what you did wrong. But it doesn’t matter because they’re not really your family. They don’t even have faces.”
Ben ruminated on her words. “Yeah,” he said, at last. “Yeah, something like that.” It wasn’t exactly like that, at least not for him, but he did not doubt that Fiela was speaking truthfully of her own nocturnal experiences. She sounded very much like a person desperate for confirmation that she was not alone in her suffering.
Still, he hesitated. A hundred million dollars was on the line if he was lured into doing something he wasn’t supposed to do, assuming the Nisirtu learned of his indiscretion. There could be cameras in the room.
“Please?” she said.
Alright, Ben, time to man up. This girl rescued you from a giant squid monster and you’re going to make her beg you for a little reciprocal security? Pretty pathetic, buddy.
He put his arm on top of the sheet and around her. The sheet did little to conceal what lay beneath. She was soft - excruciatingly soft - in all the right places, but where her gender allowed some latitude, her body was like steel wrapped in layers of silk. He felt her reach down and clasp his hand and he held his breath, knowing his own weakness, but she simply pulled it upward and pinned it between her cheek and pillow.
“Just this,” she said.
They lay together like that for several minutes before she whispered, “Did you ever get tired of your war, Ben?”
“Tired? Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. Very quickly, really.”
“Even though you were winning?”
“It didn’t matter. After awhile no one was sure what winning meant.”
“I get tired too,” she said. “I was so young when it started. Me and my friends were so sure we would win quickly. There were thousands of us and we were brave and strong and proud. Now most of my friends are dead. None of us thought the rebels would fight for so long.”
Ben wasn’t sure what to say. Was the Nisirtu civil war really as physical as she made it out to be? Remembering the scars on her legs and how she had so easily dispatched the policemen allegedly sent to kill her, he conceded that maybe it was. The Nisirtu seemed powerful enough to keep the entire conflict under wraps.
He said, “I’m sure you and your friends put up a good fight.”
She nodded vigorously against his hand, which was suddenly wet. “We did. We really did. Three times I glimpsed the underworld.” Her voice quivered. “Someday I will tell you of the battles. You will be proud of me.”
“Proud? Fiela, you don’t need to impress me.”
“But you are the only one who will understand,” Fiela objected. “Uncle and Lilian have never had to fight. You know what it is like. The chaos.”
Ben grunted, not wanting to continue the discussion. Remembering the war meant remembering the car bomb and Eddie and the dog, and all were bait for the terrors. He could feel them sniffing around, even now
Fiela apparently sensed his tension. She kissed his hand and said, “Never mind. That was our past. You are tired and I shall let you sleep. Goodnight, Ben.”
“Goodnight,” he said, and slept, and dreamt no more.
Part 3 - September 23rd
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nbsp; Dicit ei Pilatus: ‘Quid est veritas?’
John 18:38