A massive cluster of overhead lights came on at once with a sound like a cough, then grew slowly warmer and brighter as if the room itself were waking. They were on the cold marble of a sunken circular floor that was ringed by six rows of stadium seats—fussily decorated walnut wood seats with black velvet cushions and dark gold trim. A gladiator arena, thought Erno.
“A surgery,” said Emily. And then Erno realized she was right again: more than anything, the room resembled a painting in the Philadelphia art museum of a crowd of spectators watching doctors cut into a dead or sleeping patient. The Gross Clinic, it was called, and it was.
Four doors opened at compass points, and robed figures filed in. Black-hooded mantles, open in front over pink waistcoats, white aprons, and deep red pants. All men. They sat down silently, and in an orderly and practiced manner. Emily’s chest rose and fell rapidly to the shallow breaths and fluttering heartbeat of the tiny animal she was.
“Freemen,” said a voice somewhere. No one had stood, and the room was something of an echo chamber, so it was hard to determine who was speaking. “They say good things come to those who wait.”
“Whoever they are,” said another robe, and there was a murmur of good-natured laughter.
“Indeed,” said another robe, possibly the first again. Now Erno saw him, descending the stadium stairs to stand by the cage. “They. They with their ancient wisdom. The mysterious they who pull the strings. I think, for the sake of argument, that we can agree that they are we?”
Another murmur, one of agreement. “Quite so,” said an anonymous someone.
“They also say, I believe, that one cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. I regret you can’t see much through this cage, but if, on your way to tonight’s ceremony, you choose to peek through its thin windows, you might pay your respects to these two unfortunate eggs we’ll be breaking.”
Erno was pretty sure he’d followed all that. He wished he hadn’t.
“And let us have a round for our Augustus Wilson—”
Emily gasped.
“—who like Launcelot has faltered and fled but like Launcelot has returned to us once more. Gus?”
Mr. Wilson pulled back his hood and rose to acknowledge the light applause. Emily wasn’t watching.
“It’s really him,” whispered Erno. “It’s—”
“I know who it is,” said Emily.
Harvey drove with wild abandon. Harvey drove as if cars, pedestrians, bicycles, and birds were all semi-imaginary figments to be dispersed with curses and constant honking. Harvey drove much like Scott expected him to, really. The fact that Harvey was doing all this with his rabbity head sticking out the window didn’t attract so much attention as the fact that nobody else on the road could see him in the first place.
In fact, when the attention of the other drivers wasn’t focused on the sight of an apparently driverless car, it was focused almost entirely on the one passenger the drivers could see: Scott, who had somehow ended up in the backseat despite being the tallest if you didn’t count Harvey’s ears.
“I should be in the front seat,” he proclaimed quietly.
“Yeh should call shotgun then,” said Mick.
“Don’t even understand how an elf knows about shotgun.”
“MOVE IT!” shouted Harvey between sniffs of his nose. “Don’t the halfwitth in thith town know reckleth driving when they thee it? OUTTA THE WAY, HAMHOCKTH!”
He’d lost Emily’s trail, so they were circling the same block while Harvey tried to sniff it out again.
“You’re not old enough for the front,” Mick argued.
“You’re not big enough,” Scott answered. He mollified himself by imagining Mick wriggling in a big plastic car seat.
“There,” the rabbit-man said finally, pulling in his head. His ears looked like they’d just come out of the dryer. “I think I have her again. Heading eatht.”
“Thought we’d be headed toward Goodco headquarters,” said Scott. “Or even the factory, but … you know where we might be going…”
“The Freemen’s Temple by the train station?” Mick answered. “I was thinkin’ it, too.”
They made another couple turns and then the train station was in view. “Why don’t yeh let us out there, Harvey,” said Mick, so Harvey drove up to the passenger drop-off island west of the station as if Scott and Mick were just any boy and his imaginary friend, running late for a train.
“Hey,” said Harvey as Mick and Scott stumbled from the car. “Hey. Mick.”
Mick turned.
Harvey seemed, for once, pleasantly at a loss for words. “May the road rithe to meet you,” he said finally.
Mick held Harvey’s gaze for a moment, then grunted and turned away.
The station was nearly deserted this time of night. They walked around the edge and turned the corner, and then they could see it: the temple. All gargoyles and arches. The whole structure was a massive gargoyle, crouching over the boulevard.
“Last chance to go to the police,” Scott breathed.
“We are goin’ to the police,” Mick answered, jutting his chin toward the temple. “They’re just inside, waitin’ for us.”
Scott sighed. A last car turned in front of them and then the light was theirs.
“So how are we going to do this? How do we even get in?”
Mick grinned up at him. “Betcha they forgot to lock the door.”
There was a spirited conversation going on in the surgery. Most of the cloaked men had already left the room for the ceremony mentioned earlier, but a new man had joined them. Not a Freeman perhaps. He wasn’t wearing a robe but rather seemed to be dressed for fishing or a safari. A Freeman was just answering some question of his that Erno hadn’t heard.
“He’s … it’s…”
“I think ‘it’ will suffice,” said the new man.
“It’s being held in another part of the temple. Under constant guard. It’s very strong.”
“I have seen the beast in action, and I wholeheartedly agree,” said the new man. “What a find. I will even take him in lieu of payment.”
“They’re talking about Biggs,” Emily whispered.
“I know,” said Erno. “I mean, I figured.”
The new man circled their cage, squinting from a distance through the slits. His hands trembled slightly. But that may have been age rather than nerves, thought Erno. He was pretty old.
“As soon as Haskoll returns he will help me fully sedate and transport the specimen back to the lodge. It’ll be nice to have one that a person can see without rose-colored glasses, wot?”
“But he’s not really Bigfoot,” a Freeman tried to explain. “We think he might be this kid Goodco tested on in the sixties.”
“Indeed. And then this ‘kid’ escaped from Goodco’s West Coast facility and into the northern California woods, where its movements were recorded in the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. There may be no such animal as Bigfoot, gentlemen, but this fellow will do in a pinch, eh? I’m going to display him next to the wet bar.”
All but one of the remaining Freemen took up this debate, which seemed to center on whether their leader would want the Bigfoot or not, and whether their leader’s interests trumped the old man’s. Throughout this, one Freeman stood apart. He just now came to crouch by the cage.
“Hello, kids,” said Mr. Wilson.
Erno called him a name that he hadn’t even realized he knew until that moment. Mr. Wilson cleared his throat.
“Hi, Dad,” whispered Emily.
Erno sighed. “What are you going to do to us?”
“Me? Nothing. I’m not a part of this anymore, Erno.”
“Oh, my mistake—you know what threw me off? The matching outfits.”
“I tried to run away,” Mr. Wilson whispered, and he looked over his shoulder at the others by the door. “I’ll run away again. But they were right on my tail, and it was either come in or be captured.”
“You’re an American hero.”
&
nbsp; Emily was still backed into the corner of the cage, as far from Mr. Wilson’s face as she could be. But still she touched Erno on the hand, a touch that chided, Don’t be mean.
“I’ve been sick,” said Mr. Wilson. “I haven’t been myself—”
“Because you’ve been taking the Milk,” Erno interjected. “And it changed you, right? Poisoned your mind like it’s poisoned Emily’s? Just clear something up for me, because I’m totally confused: does Jekyll turn into Hyde in this example or is it Hyde into Jekyll?”
Mr. Wilson looked down at the floor, then over his shoulder again. “I can’t take back what I’ve done. But you kids should know that I care about you in my own way.”
Emily made a little noise. She’d been crying, silently. “Obviously,” she whimpered. “I already know that.”
Mr. Wilson smiled. “Course you do.”
“Well, I guess I haven’t figured out this new game yet,” said Erno. “So tell me why I should believe anything you say.”
“Because I’ve just unlocked your cage,” Mr. Wilson replied, then he rose quickly and walked away.
CHAPTER 27
Scott and Mick were in. They’d followed a sign around the back of the temple that said DELIVERIES IN REAR, and had found a vacant loading dock and an unlocked door. Now they were hiding behind a stack of crates in a cinder block room piled high with boxes and cans. Their eyes adjusted to the scant moonlight slicing in through high windows.
“Freemen eat a lot of Maraschino cherries,” whispered Scott.
“I imagine they throw most o’ them away,” Mick answered. “They’re just garnish.”
“How do you—?”
“This isn’t my first time here. The Freemen have a house drink they call a Pink Dragon.”
“Adults are so weird.”
“It’s people are weird. People are weirder’n anybody.”
They moved carefully through the room toward a dimly lit doorway draped with long slats of plastic, passing palettes of lemon juice, boxes of cocktail onions, crates of liquor with butler names like Hennessy and Hendrick. Maybe all the Freemen would be drunk, thought Scott. He hadn’t spent any time around drunk people and so assumed they’d be easier to deal with.
They reached the door and peered through the dirty plastic slats into a hallway. Halfway down there were two men in black, like the ones in the park, lacking only the motorcycle helmets. They were armed and wearing pink lenses and standing on either side of a big metal door. At the end of the hall was another door to who knows where. Mick pulled Scott back into the shadows.
“That’s a big freezer, that is,” Mick whispered. “Somethin’ important inside.”
“Oh my God. Erno and Emily. They’re going to eat them.”
“They’re not gonna—”
“They’re going to grind them up and make cereal out of them.”
Mick seemed to be considering this.
“Rumor has it they’ve been puttin’ pixie in the Puftees since the mid-eighties,” he admitted.
Scott gagged.
“Put it outta your head,” said Mick. “Whatever’s in that freezer, we wan’ it. We’ll deal with whatever it is once it’s ours. Just gotta get those wardens outta the way. Yeh see their pink goggles? They’re takin’ no chances.”
Scott swallowed and nodded. Then he had an idea.
He began, slowly and quietly, to move boxes and jars.
After some time Mick seemed to understand and joined in. He helped with the olive jars, then opened a bottle of vodka and started emptying it in a circle on the floor. Scott came over.
“What’s that for?” he whispered.
“For the ring o’ fire.”
“The … what?”
Mick stared back. “I assumed we were trappin’ ’em in a ring o’ fire. What were you plannin’?”
Scott pointed to different parts of the setup and sort of mimed what he expected to happen.
Mick looked it all over, then nodded. “’Kay, but if it goes south I’m lightin’ a ring o’ fire. Found some matches by the back door.”
Scott scanned the ceiling for sprinklers or smoke detectors and, seeing none, shrugged. “Ready?”
Mick nodded, and Scott crept up to the door to the hall again. Then he burst through the plastic slats.
“Oh no!” he cried theatrically. The guards turned and raised their rifles, and Scott felt a flutter of panic. What if they just shot him in the back before he could get through the slats again? But he turned and retreated anyway into the storeroom, hopped, stopped, and got out of the way. The first man emerged through the slats at a run, tripped over the box of vermouth they’d set on the floor, and fell face-first onto the vast bed of olive jars that lay there on their sides like rollers on an assembly line. He was swept forward across the face of this bed of jars and hit his head against the cinder block wall. Then Mick knocked a stack of liquor boxes on top of him for good measure.
But the second guard was not so reckless. He crouched at the slats and poked his head and weapon through, and aimed both squarely at Mick.
“Don’t move!” he shouted. “Do not move. Where’s that kid? Kid! Come out where I can see you or I shoot the midget.”
Scott emerged from behind some crates with his hands up.
“All right,” said the man. “Go stand by your friend.” He kept his gun leveled as he backed cautiously over the scattered jars and boxes toward his partner.
“He okay?” asked Scott.
“Shut up!” He crouched next to the prostrate body of the other guard and pushed liquor boxes aside.
“Mick?” whispered Scott.
Mick lit a match and tossed it, and then both guards were encircled by a wall of limpid flame. A wall that was not anywhere near as tall as Scott expected it to be.
Still, in the confusion, he and Mick darted in opposite directions: Scott behind a forklift, Mick through the slats and into the hallway. The guard waved his weapon around, let his moment pass, and turned to heave his partner up off the floor.
Mick darted back out from the hallway into the storeroom and passed by where Scott was hiding. “Lad! Have yeh seen a knife anywheres?”
“Hey!” shouted the guard. He dropped his partner to the floor, raised his gun, squinted over the flames. But Mick was quick, and already out of his line of sight.
“I saw a box cutter on top of the cherries,” Scott called back. “Mick! We could have done something cool with this forklift.”
“Too late for that!” said Mick as he rushed back again. He had the box cutter in his hand.
“HEY!” repeated the guard, who had hoisted the other man over his shoulder a second time. Once more he dumped his partner and raised his weapon, but Mick was already gone. “You two are so dead.” The liquor flames had widened and spread, but were by now burning pretty low. Eventually the guard realized there wasn’t really any fire left to save his partner from and dropped him again. “You’re lucky I almost never shoot kids,” he shouted in Scott’s direction, then stepped gingerly through the jars and olives and last licks of flame toward the hall.
There was an old beige phone with a long curly cord mounted on the wall next to the doorway. The guard took this off the hook and crouched down at Mick’s level, separating the plastic slats with the barrel of his rifle so he could peek down the corridor. “This is Jacobs at the freezer,” he said into the mouthpiece. Scott craned his neck over the forklift to see.
Then the slats clattered open and the man fell back, looked up, up some more, higher still at the massive, steaming-cold, slouching figure of Biggs. The big man was shivering, barely on his feet. Mick was doing his best to steady him, but thanks to the size difference, the elf looked more like a leg-humping dog than a viable means of support.
“Um,” said the guard. He rose quickly, falling back, and dropped the beige receiver in favor of lifting his rifle to the level of Biggs’s chest. Biggs stumbled forward, swung both arms upward like sledgehammers, and knocked the guard clean off his f
eet. The rifle went off with a powerful bang and chipped a divot of plaster off the ceiling. The guard collapsed in a heap, and then so did Biggs.
Scott ran to join them as Mick began slapping Biggs’s face, trying to revive him. Scott picked up the telephone receiver where it lay.
“Never mind,” he told it, and hung up.
CHAPTER 28
The surgery was empty now apart from three stragglers. Everyone else had gone off to watch some kind of initiation ceremony that was taking place in another part of the temple, or so Erno had gathered. He watched from his cage as a variety of bare metal carts were wheeled in and arranged around the room. Two appeared to be gurneys: cold steel beds with leather restraints for arms and legs. Two more were merely carts laden with scalpels, scissors, clamps, tiny saws (was that a corkscrew?), sponges, and a dozen other instruments whose purpose could not be deciphered from their shiny alien curves. Amid these was a glass jar with the word ether spelled on the side in flaking gold.
One of the remaining Freemen had changed into surgical scrubs and was just snapping a pair of rubber gloves over his hands. He had white hair and dark-framed glasses and a kindly grandpa look about him. “I suppose this is to be the only anesthetic?” he asked, waving at the ether. “I have an anesthesia machine at headquarters.”
“Word has it that some person or persons have been snooping around HQ recently,” a Freeman answered from the gallery. “Our Lady didn’t want to risk bringing them there after hours.”
“We know it’s not ideal, Bill,” said another Freeman. “Everyone’s improvising. We’ve barely had a second to look through Wilson’s notes.”