CHAPTER 16
What on Earth could Tom mean by j'ai La Mer de cette petite boite de Poe d'Astérion – who was Poe d'Asterion?
“Your friends come up with the strangest codes for their cryptic messages, Terry...”
At least this wasn't some convoluted substitution code like Frieda and Hans-Jörg Schnellenlauter used back in the day of the Unsterblichesverein.
“I have 'The Sea' of this little box of Poe d'Asterion”? What does Debussy's La Mer, or as we'd jokingly called it, La Merde, have... ah – 'I have the shits of this little box'...?”
“Remember,” Tom continued, “Mozart's 1st Violin Concerto, and Schubert's Spring Song I've always loved (the part-song for men's voices), especially that singularly serious quartet from last year and our favorite piece of chamber music? It would be gauche of what's left of me to assume you're more adroit, because I'm always right” – speaking of puns.
No doubt he'd intended La Mer to be a remembrance of puns past. “He's harking back to last week's pun duel, a flashback to Faber: what pun should I be looking for?” And why? “This list of works he's referring to means something – catalogs and opus numbers... It's like playing long-distance charades but with texts.”
“Have Cameron reply,” Tom concluded, “once if by land, twice not by sea. We can do lunch when you get back?”
“Ah,” I concluded. “You must call his land line.”
“You have the number?”
I pointed at the string of works. “Not as obtuse as that mistyped listening list he'd left us last year, remember?” (The one that explained if something happened, he suspected SHMRG was after him.) “Here: Mozart's 1st Violin Concerto is K.207. And 207 is Tom's Area Code in Maine. Check the Schubert – that's the exchange.”
“And the last four, rather crucial digits?”
“That's easy – Beethoven and Brahms!” I wrote down the complete number. “That'll be his land-line. 'Not if by sea' means 'don't call my C – or cell phone'.”
And that left Poe d'Astérion. “Wasn't Asterion the real name of the Minotaur in the labyrinth? And Poe isn't the poet, it's peau for skin or hide. The hide of the Minotaur – Hyde's Minotaur!”
“And if his cell phone had been hacked” – Cameron recalling recent problems with my own phone – “yours must've been hacked, too.”
After assigning Cameron to call Tom's land-line number around 1:00 (“once”), we moved on to the details of why we were in Iowa. “If only they'd be as easy as figuring out Tom's code...”
“Right... So, are we missing something in Hawthorne's background,” Cameron wondered, “pointing to an accomplice who could've served as a decoy?”
“Ah, excellent! Like frequent mentions of a friend or lover? Too bad we don't have phone records we could tap into.” Cameron immediately tapped into the mighty Internet to see what he could find.
“It feels like one of those 'Escape Rooms' where you're locked inside, trying desperately to solve how you can get out.” When Cameron saw my total lack of comprehension, he tried explaining the concept.
“Sounds dreadfully claustrophobic. What if you can't 'escape'?”
“Oh, there's usually some agreed-upon 'safe-word' with the Room Master like 'now' and...”
“...Yes?”
Cameron was interrupted by something new popping up in the search results. “This was just posted yesterday: it's an obituary for Phillips L. Hawthorne, Sr. Seems he died on Sunday – he was 82.”
“The day before they found the body that could've been his son? Sad.”
“Not much closure, if that's not his son.”
Would Old Hawthorne's death release some of the continuing pressure on Tom, or reduce the funding for “Great American Cold Cases”?
“Or, conversely,” I wondered, “might it bring a long-lost Trazmo out of hiding?
If we're going to start the day, I should get my shower so we can head out to forage for breakfast, preferably not at the diner (which brought a sigh of relief from Cameron). By the time I was done, Cameron was deep into his book about that Nepali meditation he'd been so keen on.
“So,” I asked him, “how's it going, this Gohira thing you're reading about?”
“Gahirō brahmānda,” he corrected me. “It's making sense.”
There was a pause waiting for the obvious question which I hadn't asked.
He began telling me how people have, supposedly, used it to levitate through time and space.
“Physical space, or outer space? Worthwhile distinction, not knowing how tuned in Nepali deities are to English subtleties.”
“It's not like I'm going to go flying off into some astral dimension just from reading a book. It's interesting, though.”
It was more about personal discipline, focusing on the emptiness of the ego in order to transcend physical and spiritual limitations. “It feels good to try emptying the mind of even a little stress.” He laughed. “Wouldn't it be cool if I could use it to travel back in time to the night Trazmo disappeared?” Being next door ought to make it easier. “What if I could only go back in my mind, not necessarily physically?”
“Right. Just leave me a note or something before you skip out, okay?”
So instead of hitting the motel's diner, I suggested that little restaurant up in Greenfield, not far from Doc Femorsen's lab.
“Same food, different diner, but that's fine.” We mosied out to the car.
“Then we drop by Femorsen's and say, 'Hey, we were in the area...' Maybe he'll have something he can tell us.”
The drive to Greenfield was no less boring than it had been on Tuesday but it was more depressing because of this business about my phone getting hacked and the daPonte Letter getting stolen.
Wondering if Tom was in any kind of danger, Cameron added, “I mean, he didn't say 'call ASAP.' For that matter, given someone hacked your phone and stole that letter, how safe are we?”
“Well, out here in the middle of nowhere, we should be relatively safe.”
Cameron shot me one of his “askance” glances.
Back in the motel as if we'd never left it – or there'd been no point in leaving it to begin with, since Femorsen eventually admitted he's not supposed to tell us anything (“Sheriff's orders”) – we decided to “bide our time” (which sounded less violent than “kill time”) until Cameron could make that call to Tom. So there was that to add to my list of woes since we're now apparently off the case with no idea how I could help Tom in what we'd euphemistically been calling “our investigation.”
We'd taken a brisk walk around Greenfield after breakfast, a pleasant change of scenery, somewhat refreshed until Femorsen shot us down. I tried reading, burrowing under layers of Teufelsdröckh's philosophical musings, which didn't help.
Cameron returned to his Tibetan – “Nepali,” he corrected me – meditation book and read out the basic instructions about “cleansing the mind.”
It all sounded like so much foolishness, trendy clap-trap for the fashionably gullible, but I thought, given the weight of reality on my mind, why not try getting out from under some of it? If nothing else, it might allow me to doze off for an hour, and an hour's rest itself would be welcome.
Because this was Cameron's first attempt, he'd only concentrate on what's on the other side of that wall right now just a few feet away, the room that had been Trazmo's back in 1983.
God knows I'd found (mostly by accident) numerous ways of doing the impossible: things like time travel, or ending up in some parallel universe. What if Cameron's mind can make it through that wall?
He placed his chair so it touched the wall, his goal only inches away from his head when he leaned back.
“Okay, I think I'm going to try this,” Cameron sighed, putting the book down. He took up a pose on the chair, cross-legged with his hands, palm upwards, on his knees. “Please don't interrupt...”
“As long as you don't end up in that palace in Katmandu the day some prince went nuts and massacred nine members of the Royal Family.”
“Shhh!”
“Sorry – don't do anything I would do...”
I sat back and admitted it was calming to see him so relaxed, all the stress flowing out of his body.
Not sure my focusing on him, watching as he tried to divest himself of his surroundings, would complicate things for him, I settled back on the bed, staring into my own course of thinking. One by one, thoughts and images floated to the surface; I swept them away, like on a phone screen – ffftttt! – gone!
Then something new surfaced, unbidden: yes, they'd found a body but where'd it wash up from? It didn't just appear there. A shallow grave further upstream – or those abandoned buildings out there I'd noticed?
No, this thought I didn't want to delete, not yet. Had Diddon checked those? They weren't far from that old factory. Hadn't the place been abandoned until recently, the main building renovated and re-purposed? Could the place've already been abandoned in 1983? What happened that this body had “unearthed” itself? Was Trazmo's body still there?
Cameron was breathing so shallowly and I so wanted to tell him this, but I was also afraid getting up to write it down on my notepad might be enough to disturb him. “Crap...”
It'll have to wait till he gets back. How long could this take? That's when my phone rang. “Crap.” Bond's ring-tone.
I practically went into convulsions trying to stifle it. Before I fumbled, opening it, there was a brilliant blue flash and I'm in this large empty hallway.
“Crap! Now where the hell am I...?”
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
The hallway was long, but other than being remarkably devoid of other people, the most noticeable aspect of it was the occasional rectangular window along the one side, flush with the ceiling – which was quite high, now that I thought of it, maybe 12 feet – windows designed for people who apparently were 10 feet tall. Since I couldn't see out them, they were probably designed only as a source of natural light, long rows of fluorescent lights not in use; perhaps, like basement windows, people outside could see in? There were no windows on the opposite wall which might've been an inside room, so this hallway was the building's outside perimeter which meant with any luck, somewhere further along, there was an exit. Otherwise, it was featureless, everything painted white, a bit dingy – tile, plaster, concrete – not that it really helped identify my location.
Okay, this hallway connected two places. It was a flip of a coin to choose which direction, if I'd had a coin. Either way ended in corners, and I stood near the hallway's midpoint. While there didn't seem to be any visible surveillance cameras (a good thing), it also didn't help fix the “when-am-I” question. I suppose I could've been in some institutional hallway from the 1980s, like a school or maybe some hospital or factory. The bad news, regardless, was, I was alone: how would I get back?
Cameron had been concentrating on the room next door, Trazmo's old room from 33 years ago, and this clearly wasn't that. Did his meditative brain-waves get short-circuited by mine and I ended up here? Well, I was thinking about checking out those old warehouses on the edge of the crime scene, then Bond had called. Deciding on a direction, I headed... well, that way, perhaps back, at least onward – maybe the outer reaches of the building? I reached the corner, listened, heard nothing, and peeked around it. More hallway...
The good news was, there was a larger window low enough I could look out if I were six feet four. I gripped the ledge and pulled myself up to see – what? A field. Over to the right, there was – ah, a police car with people milling about! And on the left, those dilapidated warehouses!
Yesterday, we'd been standing there where that police car is, looking toward here. Today, I'm here facing where we were yesterday: I'm still in Orient, not far from where I'd just been thinking about. So, I'd not been disoriented, after all! Well, that's a relief. Now to figure out how to get back to there.
But what did Bond's call have to do with it, this astral cross-current? Was she calling me with some Osiris update? I need to check my phone's voice-mail. (Wait, where the hell's my phone?)
So here I am, stuck inside that renovated factory, the Old Ratchett Factory – what did Diddon's deputy call it, “Basilisk something”? Wait a minute – wasn't this Osiris fellow the founder and CEO of Basilikon? Wasn't he in real life Biblos Tamirakis, that infamously reclusive legendary figure of the technology world? Is this a Basilikon outpost?
At the end of this hallway was a set of double doors and over the doorway was the only decoration I've seen so far: a logo like an Ouroboros, a snake swallowing its tail. But in this case, this symbol of eternity featured not a snake but a crested lizard – a basilisk? Osiris' Basilikon Industries?
Could this mean I'm inside what could be Osiris' new headquarters for his latest project to dominate the classical music world?
With any luck, Cameron's noticed my absence and is making the necessary corrections.
The next question was, do these doors lead out of the building or into one of the warehouses – no, those were in the opposite direction; perhaps there's an exit there? I should turn around. What if these led into a busy lobby or office area? They didn't look like exit doors – and no windows, either.
Uh-oh. Footsteps...
Someone hurrying toward the door pushed it open. There was no place to hide even if I'd had time.
He saw me and raised an assault rifle toward me. “Who are you?”
He wore rather odd camouflage, dark green with a scaly pattern and a flared helmet covering the back of the neck. (Seriously, they dress their security guards like lizards?) “What is you do here?” He muttered something harsh, possibly Arabic, into a wrist-band radio – with his weird goggles, I couldn't see more than his mouth.
Two more lizard-like men arrived with rifles – what was there to guard here? – and I was marched down another hallway. “This is a restricted area.” I tried apologizing. Maybe they'd just kick me out. Instead, they pushed me into a small interrogation room and locked the door. I heard them return in a few minutes.
But when they pulled the door back, I saw two Middle-Eastern men and this huge black creature behind them looking in.
“Damn it.” I couldn't find my phone. I must've dropped it when I tried answering Bond's call and got that bright blue flash. (What kind of apps has Cameron been downloading?)
“Crap! Now what...!”
Another flash of blue – but before they could enter the room, they disappeared.
No, I'd disappeared – another hallway, different people headed my way – a woman and a man, both dressed in white lab coats.
“Regrettable, yes, Agent Krahang,” she was saying, “but this is science and science involves running experimental tests, even on human beings.”
I'd turned down a side hallway to avoid them. They must've seen me...
The woman looked vaguely familiar, tall and striking. The man was Asian, young.
“Yes, Dr. Piltdown, but...”
Piltdown! – from the motel?
“We must test them on humans if these Mobots are to be effective.”
Mobots!
“Holy crap!” I'm right in the middle of Osiris' latest Mobot project!
“I've got to get out of here – now!”
= = = = = = =
©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train
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