Interlude #7
(She Lay There, and Then the Darkness Took Her Once More.)
Penny watched what she drank as the evening unfolded and she could see Ryan doing the same. Predictably he was having less success, and his mood was showing frayed edges as the alcohol took effect.
CJ used his pool cue as a stick to aid him as he walked around the table. His movements were slow but sure, and his aim even more so. Every shot was confident, and his aim never failed. No one was keeping score, but they all knew that if they were Ryan would never have a hope of winning. The younger man smiled and laughed in all the right places, but Penny could see a grey veil over his eyes. He wanted to be anywhere else but here.
The sound cracked through the games room, and Penny let her gaze move casually over its furnishings. She sat on a large curve of leather sofa, her slouched body indicating her intoxication. She had played a few frames earlier, deliberately minimising her skill until she retired from it, citing her ineptitude. In truth, she could play the game as well as anyone and had occasionally used her skill to pay her way in the world.
Tonight, was not the night to draw attention to herself, so she lost a few frames and then announced she would rather watch the men play. She was confident that Ryan knew her ploy, and CJ might have done as well, but both men allowed her to retire gracefully, so she sat and watched.
Ryan played well, but CJ was just too good. She would watch Ryan make a good break, and clear almost all of the table, but the moment CJ had a chance he would annihilate Ryan as opposition.
There was no clock in the room, and Penny wore no watch, time meant little to her. There was always someone awake somewhere. She slept when she felt sleepy, and ate when she was hungry, which was time enough for her. She judged the time to be nearing two in the morning and thought it was probably the time. She rose, letting her glass tip over in the process and spill the remains of her drink, then wiggled over to the edge of the pool table.
It was easy pretending to be more drunk than she was. The high heels helped, she was not used to them and was unsteady wearing them, but she had to be careful. She relaxed just enough that she wobbled but not enough so she fell.
A sprained ankle would be disastrous.
She almost fell against Ryan, squeezing his arm to draw his attention. She leaned in and kissed him on the mouth. He tastes of rum and chocolate.
“I’m going back to my room,” she said just loud enough for CJ to hear then added, much more quietly, “after a little look around.”
Ryan kissed her back. It was a long kiss and for a moment the world went away. “Get some rest,” he replied, “We got a long day tomorrow.”
Penny pulled away more reluctantly than she would have believed. The bond she had felt with Ryan from almost the moment she met him was supernatural. She had never felt anything like it, and she took some comfort in knowing that it was not something she fell into at every corner. What she felt around him was something new.
“Good night, Miss Penny,” CJ said. His voice was refined and presented with all the good intent a person would expect, but beneath it, Penny thought she heard dark humour as if he knew something that she would want to know.
“Good night, CJ. Don’t keep him up too late.” She replied.
In the corridor, Penny paused to collect herself. She slipped off the high heels and held them as she walked, making her footsteps almost silent and her gait far steadier.
She had listened carefully when CJ had left them earlier, then again when he had greeted them in the games room, both times she had counted the steps and considered the direction from which they came.
Now she retraced them, it wouldn’t lead directly to the office he said he was spending time in, but it would guide her in the right direction. It was the sound of the cane that was the largest clue, it had made a clipping sound on the hard floor, but in the distance, when the sound was quieter, she thought she had heard it make a hollow sound.
She turned the corner and saw the stairs.
A hollow sound like it might make on wooden stairs.
Penny smiled. She knew that she had missed her calling in life. When she was a child, she loved the TV series Columbo. She liked the main character, but the villain’s ingenious schemes fascinated her.
For a long time, she wanted to join the police, and then she discovered that sometimes people act as private detectives, and the idea lit her brain on fire. It was then that she learned the basics of lick picking that would serve her in a very different way much later, and she had learned that her greatest weapon was her mind.
She could have done those things, but they were now just part of the list of things her father had taken from her.
Penny pushed the thought away and climbed the stairs.
It was a single flight of steps that led to a single corridor, and the single wide corridor had a single door standing at its end and two on either side of her near the top of the stairs.
She tried those two first. The first led to a conference room roughly the same size as a tennis court, three cars could be parked bumper to bumper on the table at its centre, and it was thick enough to take the weight.
Impressive as it was the room held no interest for her, so she moved to the door opposite. This was another large room, but she only had access to a tiny portion of it. The rest was barred from her by a thick mesh of metal. Behind it were rows upon rows of racks. On the racks were electronics, Penny guessed it was part of a huge computer.
She knew little about computers, she had seen them on television and once briefly held down a job as a data in-putter on a huge machine that was more mechanical than electrical, but their construction was much of a mystery to her. She imagined the computer was either huge or old, its size indicated one or the other.
Penny abandoned the room and went to the door at the corridor’s end. It was obvious from the start that this would be her destination, but she needed to check to make sure no one was close enough to discover her. She could hear if someone climbed the stairs, especially CJ with that cane, so she felt more comfortable knowing she was alone on this floor.
The door was locked, and that was a good sign. A locked door meant important things were inside. Penny slipped the paperclips and pins she had collected since the previous night. Sooner or later, she knew a lock would present itself, so she had this time come prepared.
This door took eighteen seconds.
The room behind it was larger than the conference room and contained more shelves. These shelves were not metal, but wood deeply tanned by the sweat of many hands over the years. The books lined on them were huge tomes covered in thick leather. She looked at the lettering on their spines but could not understand one of them. They were all written in swirling language that she associated with the Far East.
She counted the rows of bookshelves as she passed them, they were arranged in rows where two sets of shelves faced each other. It was like entering an old public library, but Penny doubted the average reader would find much they could read.
At the far end of the room was a desk. It was large, about the same size as a double bed. On the walls were framed photographs. CJ stood in many of them, beside him were men and women that Penny found familiar. She was certain some of them were movie stars, and others had the vapid smiles of politicians.
The desk had a large green place ma, a brass light and twin trays, both empty, so Penny guessed that one of the desk drawers would contain files. There were four and the whole desk was unlocked within a minute. In the final drawer, she found something that she didn’t recognise. It was a grey flat box made of metal. Its edges were tapered with vents running around them. The words ‘Kaypro 2000’ were etched across the top in large letters.
She slid the makeshift lock-picking tools back into their hiding place in the hem of her dress and then turned back to the Kaypro. It was about the same size as a briefcase and weighed the same as a two-month-old baby. She placed it on the desk and examined it until she found how to get it open.
It was a computer, but she had never seen anything like it. Built into the lid was a thin screen that flickered on when she found the power button and pressed it. She heard a fan begin to turn inside and then something else clicked on and a cursor blinked on the grey and black screen.
She looked in the desk drawer and found a box of three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks. She looked through them, most were labelled by date, but one was labelled The Gate.
She slid it into the computer and stared at the screen struggling to remember the command to open it. She tried a command and nothing happened, then another and the screen went momentarily blank. Slowly she remembered and after some trial and error, the disk contents were listed on the screen. She began to read through the documents it contained, each one filling her with more dread, apartment numbers, crimes, and deaths. Symbols and blocks of language she had no hope of deciphering, lists of names, dates beside them, then a series of letters.
Letters that looked like initials.
She scanned down the list. What she was looking for was close to the top.
CJ.
Her instincts were correct, things were bad, but she had not foreseen how bad. This was something else entirely. She could not believe she was contemplating this, but it appeared that this wasn’t a record of events, it was a schedule.
Beside the letters CJ she found eight entries. The dates ranged from the mid-sixties to the twenty-fifth of June nineteen-eighty-five, today’s date. Besides it was a single notation.
Unresolved.
The word was underlined and in blue. A link to another file. She clicked on it, and when the file opened she felt her legs turn into putty beneath her. The walls closed in, and the contents of her stomach threatened to rise into her throat.
It was far worse than she thought.
Far, far worse.
She had put everything back and went to her room. The journey was uneventful, once she made a wrong turn and had to backtrack but quickly reorientated herself and was back in her room within ten minutes.
Immediately she stripped out of her dress and searched for the clothes she had arrived in. She found them, they had been cleaned and hung in the closet beside the expensive ensemble left for her. Whoever did the job had left a significant gap between her clothes and the ones provided.
Penny pulled on the denim skirt and the t-shirt. She wasn’t staying in this building for another moment. She would find Ryan and force him to leave with her. She wasn’t certain how she would accomplish this if he determined to stay, but she wanted to be far away from this place as quickly as possible.
She grabbed her shoes and jacket and stepped across the hallway to Ryan’s door. She peered inside. He was not there.
She had left them in the games room an hour ago. It was likely that they were still there. She made her way towards it.
There was no sound. It was like walking through the vacuum of space, and she knew before she opened the door that no one was there.
At first, Penny thought the men had found another room to pass the time in, perhaps a place where they could talk the business that Ryan was convinced would grant him some access to the world of the rich man. Then she noticed the pool cue. It was lay at the base of the pool table, its end broken off, and when she looked closer, she saw a single drop of blood seeping into the carpet.
Penny didn’t panic, what she did was worse.
She froze, her usually quick wits evaded her, and she blinked in confusion at her discovery. At that moment she realised that her future with Ryan had already been set as a certainty in some dark corner of her mind. Though she had only known him for a day, his presence was now an intrinsic part of whatever she planned to do with her life.
It’s a little like falling in love, she had said, and she thought she had been right when those words appeared to her. She had been right, that was how it had felt, but she now realised it felt that way because it was that way.
It was more than a little like falling in love.
It was exactly like falling in love.
She loved him, and he loved her but had been so polluted by their own lives they had not seen it. They had rationalised whatever chemical reaction had occurred within their bodies, if love was such a thing, or brushed over the electrical connections their auras had created if love was that. However, she illustrated it to herself and it all boiled down to the same thing.
The spot of blood on the carpet was as vast as an ocean, and she had only two choices. She knew her life had been a series of poorly made choices. Some had been made by her father, but many others by her alone, and now she was presented with another, the biggest one she had ever faced.
Should she swim that ocean of blood or turn from it?
The paralysis broke and she took up the pool cue across the table. It was CJ’s cue and it was heavy, far too heavy.
It was a bludgeon.
Penny took it with her when she left the room, but it did no good. As she stepped out into the hallway the attack was so swift that Penny had no defence against it.
She felt a strong hand grab her by the back of her neck and her feet left the ground. The next moment she was thrown into the air, tumbling head over heels and crashing into the far wall beside the door. She slid down it and lay in a heap, dazed.
It was The Tall Woman. She was dressed in the white blouse and black trousers they had seen her in the previous night. The only difference was the bloodstain that blemished the pure white of her top.
The sight of it galvanised Penny, she rolled and grabbed the pool cue that had fallen from her hand, intending to smash it across the woman’s head. In her mind’s eyes, she saw the woman’s hair flying, and spurts of blood decorating the wall behind her, but Penny was a tiny woman, as small as a child, and her opponent was an amazon.
The fight was quick.
When Penny woke the pain that ran through her was so profound, she thought she had been broken beyond repair. She could see only smears of shade in the gloom, and she thought it may have been a blessing that she could not see what the Tall Woman had done to her broken body.
She lay there, and then darkness took her once more.
The second time she woke it was brighter, and the pain was less. It still hurt, but she knew she had not been crushed under a monster’s heel.
She was in a small room. It was nicely furnished but still a cell. She had been in enough cells to recognise one, even one as expensively dressed as this one. The window was high, and narrow, secured with three bars. The door would be locked.
Penny rose from the narrow bed, her head throbbed but when she ran her fingers over it, she found no major damage. She had bled while she slept. The silk pillowcase was smeared with her dried blood, but the wound must have been a shallow one because the blood no longer flowed.
Penny rose on unsteady feet. The door wouldn’t be a problem if unbolted on the outside, and her objective hadn’t changed.
She needed to find Ryan and then get as far from this place as they could.