Chapter Twenty-Eight
Arris walked through the doors from Onorien’s study with a glass of Scotch in his hand and stopped at the railing. The jungle was quiet, again. Too quiet, Arris thought, as he set the glass down on the railing. Quiet in the sense that the wildlife had gone to ground, a lack of noise created by the movement of men through it. He knew the sound well.
He cocked his head to the side and listened. There was no distant hum of last-minute trucks dropping soldiers off in the night, no errant click of a bolt being pulled into position, no roll of a Zippo lighter by a trooper breaking noise and light discipline to huff one last cigarette in the bottom of a foxhole before artillery softened up the position.
Arris had no idea who would be out there, although the only known candidates would be the primitives living in the shacks down by the beach on the other side of the island. Why they would be planning an assault on the mansion was anyone’s guess, although he suddenly wasn’t ruling it out given the strange ambush on the beach the other morning. For a moment, he wondered if it were he the natives might be after, but Arris ruled that out after a moment’s reflection: he was too new to the island to warrant any specific attention from them.
But, then, neither Onorien nor Nereika seemed to merit any cause for concern, so far as Arris could tell. The middle-aged man and his young assistant were little more than bookworms and collectors of antiquities, and neither activity seemed to Arris enough to pique the interests of fishermen. What would they do with any of the items Onorien had shown Arris thus far? Burn the books for fuel? Use the battle axes to crack open coconuts? Live in the mansion? None of it made any sense.
Arris walked back into the mansion and through the study, turning out of the room and into the hallway. He walked through several intersections, checking each one for sounds from distant rooms, and heard nothing. The mansion was empty. He poked his head into several rooms and saw nothing, just sitting rooms, dining rooms, display rooms and guest bedrooms. After a while, he was sure he had to be walking down the same hallways from different directions and he was unable to figure out why he couldn’t get the layout of the mansion down in his mind. There was no way he could be moving through the mansion the way he was and constantly coming to the same intersection, so he popped into a sitting room and rooted around for something to mark the hallways and doors with, or maybe a paper and pen to map out the floor plan. Nothing.
“I’m in a goddamned Escher print,” Arris said as he stared through the window of the room at the wide lawn outside.
Arris picked up a book from a small side table next to a davenport in the room and ripped a half-dozen pages from it, tearing each page into strips. As he closed the door to the room, he slipped a strip into the frame and pulled the door tightly shut. It held the paper. Arris almost allowed himself to smile, but an inner sense of caution and urgency tamped down that reaction, forcing him into reality, reinforcing the potential danger of the situation. Concentrate, he thought. Something was wrong with the pattern he had been trying to discern, and that alone told him things were seriously wrong, and extremely dangerous. He walked to the end of the hallway, pulled another door open, and slipped a strip of paper into it, closing it securely afterward. One passageway was now cleared.
He bent down and touched the pistol on his ankle through his clothing, thought better of it, and frowned. No need to reveal he was armed; better to remain unsuspecting as long as possible. He turned the corner and made his way down another corridor, slowly opening doors and slipping strips of paper into them, staying light on the balls of his feet, listening for sounds of people moving. Nothing. Silence.
As he marked the rooms, he started noticing slight differences in them, mostly in color or furniture placement. None of them seemed to be used with any frequency, judging from the layer of dust on the surfaces of any given room. And all of them seemed to have a window that faced the front lawn, a fact that confused Arris each time he looked out a window that he knew should face into the side of the mountain.
He made his way down another corridor in much the same way, marking doors with slips of paper until he noticed the top of a stairway at the end of one, evidenced by a railing on the side of the wall. He tip-toed up to it and cocked an ear toward it, listening for footfalls or the tell-tale silence of someone breathing lightly, lying in wait, trying to remain hidden until the last moment. Arris closed his eyes for a moment and listened harder, shutting out the light ringing in his ears and the soft thump of blood through his veins, searching through the stillness for anything alive.
He opened his eyes and began down the steps, creeping slowly, looking for shadows that should not be. At the bottom of the stairs he emerged into a kitchen, pristine in appearance, unused in condition. He paused and searched through it with his eyes. Not a single sign of use. No food stains, no grease near the stove, no grooves in the wooden cutting block surfaces. He stepped to the refrigerator and pulled it open: empty save for cold air. He froze in place. He roved his eyes quickly through the kitchen area, again looking for someone lying in wait, and then stared back into the empty, silent appliance.
He now knew deep in the pit of his being that something was dreadfully wrong, though his mind had difficulty aligning the various facts with a reality that made any sense. He was in a mansion on an island in the Caribbean that had all the conveniences of modern life – electricity, running water, and refrigeration - and he had yet to encounter a light switch or wall outlet. There were no phones, no televisions, no radios, and no computers. None of the basic necessities of living in the modern world were in evidence, and, yet, the mansion and its owner acted as if these services existed or were irrelevant.
Arris paused and shut the door to the refrigerator, once again listening to the background sounds. He saw a butcher block of knives on a nearby counter, walked over to it and pulled out the chef’s knife, turning it in his hand and checking it for balance. He flipped it in the air once, quickly, and caught it by the handle, feeling it set firmly in his palm. He could tell it was handmade, forged by a person, not stamped out in a mill, the tang of the blade extending through the grip, the balance perfect. He ran his finger over the blade edge: razor sharp.
He kept the knife and made his way back up the staircase into the main hall it emptied into. He looked down each corridor and saw strips of paper from the doors in both directions, aligned himself with the hallway he remembered as the primary one, and walked down it, turned and made his way back to Onorien’s study. Arris retrieved his glass of Scotch from the railing on the veranda and took a deep sip from it, letting the peaty malt wash over his tongue and sting the back of his throat, a small taste of the consistency of his reality returning with the swallow. Something, at least, was the same.
He set the knife down and perused the spines of books the on the shelves, wondering at the bizarre titles. Though he had never actually looked for any such books, he was fairly certain you couldn’t find them at the local chain mega bookstore near his house. Alchemical Infusions In Metallurgy read the one Arris pulled from the shelf, opening it to a random page and staring at a diagram, Latin words written below. He didn’t read Latin and pushed the book back into the empty slot on the shelf. As he side-stepped down the length of the shelf, browsing more titles and sipping his glass of whisky, a weird sense of foreboding nestled in the tips of his fingers and scalp.
He pulled another book from a shelf, opened it to the first page, and read aloud, softly: “It is the faith of the caster that determines the outcome of the spell, its power, its intensity. It is faith in the mystical that is required for the mystical to become real. To cast a spell, the caster must know that will be cast, know that there is no other possibility, and know that there has never been anything other than the certainty of the spell as real for the spell to be real.
“It is faith in the power of man’s will over nature that gives man entry into the power of The Divine World, and gives him dominion over all life. Without faith, man is but an anim
al subject to the laws of nature; with faith, man remakes the laws of nature.”
Arris put the book back and rolled his eyes around the room, checking to see if Onorien had silently entered behind him, again. He took a few more steps to his side and pulled another book from the shelf. There was an almost silent click, barely audible, a noise that might have been unnoticeable were the world not quite so quiet as it had become. Then there was a brief zephyr, a draft of musty, salty air that whispered past his face. Arris turned his head and stared in utter disbelief at the now-opened bookshelf to his right, revealing a secret passage behind it.
“You gotta be kidding me.”