Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (46 page)

She fought to remember. She used the pain to bring it back to her mind. It was like rising up through water—rising up from the murky, dark bottom of a deep pool. The light changed slowly, refracted through the water, becoming brighter and brighter as she neared the surface. Marianne used the pain, imagining that it was in her lungs, that it came from being submerged too long without air. She imagined herself rising up out of the murkiness into the radiating light.

And at last, she surfaced.

She gasped for breath.

Her head had broken through into the brilliant blaze of memory.

She knew what had happened.

A seduction.

Yes, that was exactly the word for it. It had been a seduction of the mind, not the body. She had become Auggie. She could remember
being
Auggie. She could remember every detail of the entire episode. She knew she wasn’t
meant
to remember—that Auggie intended the whole experience to remain lost in an amnesiac fog. But the pain had brought it hack, had brought her memories bursting to the surface. It was the pain of loving someone dearly and hurting him terribly.

Auggie had been a superb seducer. He had flattered her. He had described her as a perfect creature. He had assured her that she was capable of love. And, most powerfully of all, he had meant every word of it. Last night, he had made Marianne into one of his parts, into one of his
cells.

But to become a part of Auggie and
remain
a part of Auggie, one had to hold a loveless void in the deepest recesses of one’s heart. Perhaps even a few short weeks ago, Auggie might have captured and kept her. But no longer. Now she had thrust herself out of her sterile and empty existence. Now she had Nolan.

Because she loved Nolan, because Nolan loved her, because of the very hurt she had inflicted on him, and because of her own vicarious and visceral
experience
of
Nolan’s hurt—she was free. Auggie had lost Marianne. He had lost her because she had no emotional hollowness for him to fill.

Marianne pulled herself carefully to her feet and walked toward her computer. She felt fragile and drained of resources, emptied of all her energy. But she knew there was another effort yet to he made, although she was not sure exactly what it was she had to do.

She sat down at her desk and stared at the slowly mutating patterns of her screen-saver. When she had collapsed, she had been in the Basement—that subterranean realm where Auggie’s cells merged into one. She remembered having been one of those shapeless figures melding together in Auggie’s candlelit dressing room.

And now, when a touch of her finger made the screen-saver vanish, what would appear? Would she find herself in the Basement again? Was she in any danger of being dragged back into Auggie’s mind again, if only temporarily?

“Fat chance,” she murmured defiantly.

She shoved the computer mouse. But instead of the Basement, Insomnimania’s desktop maze appeared, displaying the way to Babbage Beach and the Speakers’ Corner and Casino del Camino.

“Damn,” Marianne whispered. “Where’s the Basement? Where the hell did it go?”

Then she remembered Auggie’s command to Elfie, his instruction to murmur in unison with him …

“The words that will bring us together.”

Without another thought, Marianne typed the words …

“Auggie is Auggie”

… and struck the return key.

The desktop maze disappeared into a blaze of glaring whiteness. The whiteness filled the screen for a moment, then shrank into a horizontal line across the middle of the screen. Then the line collapsed into a little white dot in the center of a surrounding blackness.

Just like an old TV screen.
Marianne remembered how televisions used to look when they were turned off—a single white speck of white light burning in the middle of the screen for a few seconds afterward.

But this speck of light didn’t disappear. It hung there in the center of the screen, suggestively, hauntingly. When Elfie had fallen out of Babbage Beach into this darkness, she had supposed this light to be the end of a deep, dark tunnel.

And what of the underground catacombs, Auggie’s dressing room, the door leading to a stage wildly draped with dangling scenery and marionettes? They must have been only suggestions—perhaps written across the screen, but more probably spoken to Marianne over her computer speaker.

Marianne felt an awestricken chill.

I am here. I am in Auggie’s Basement. I am inside Auggie’s mind.

And with a deeper chill, she realized she was not alone. The Basement was filled with other silent souls, Auggie’s cells, scattered across the entire nation. How many did Auggie hold enraptured? A handful? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? More? She had no way of knowing.

But she knew that a man in Omaha had killed for Auggie,
as Auggie
—a man doubtless not normally a killer. And in actuality, the man himself wasn’t a killer even after the killing, not even after his hands had held a gun and fired a fatal shot. And somewhere, probably not so far away, was the woman whose hands had held Renee beneath the water—but the woman herself had killed no one at all. In Marianne’s mind, the woman in the silver dress turned and opened her red lips as if to speak.

Perhaps the woman wanted to say, “It wasn’t me. It was Auggie.”

But she vanished before she could utter the words.

For the first time, Marianne felt sympathy for that fearful image she had so often imagined. What kind of unremembered nightmares did that woman have—did all those other people have? Had her unheard words been a plea for help?

Or were their lives such nightmares that they had abandoned their own selves to participate in something larger? Marianne shuddered as she remembered how close she had been to joining them.

More likely, they live the lives of sleepwalkers. Their unexpressed rage finds its way to Auggie. They do not act out their anger. The action belongs to Auggie. And the more of them there are, the more violence he can do.

But how could this be? Marianne had spoken with Auggie, had gotten to know him intimately, had almost
become
him,
but through it all she sensed no real anger, no real aggression about him.

“We are perfect creatures, you and I,” Auggie had told her.

Perhaps it was true in its way, but it was also the philosophy of a child. For indeed, Auggie
was
a child—a child who saw his own outbursts as a harmless game. But what if a child were a giant among insects? Such a child’s rage would he destructive, however playful it might seem.

Marianne knew that she, alone among all of Auggie’s confidantes, was not a part of his mind. She was an unhypnotized invader. And somehow it was now within her power to stop Auggie once and for all.

It was in her power to kill him.

As she searched her mind for the final key to the puzzle, she remembered Auggie’s insistent, arrogant, but at the same time bitterly lonely litany …

“I’m eternal,” he had said.

Marianne glanced at her watch. It was now approaching four o’clock. In another hour, Insomnimania would go off for the night. And when Insomnimania went off, so would the Basement.

Insomnimania begins at eight o’clock at night and ends at five o’clock in the morning.

Vaguely and instinctively, Marianne knew that Insomnimania’s oddly elitist insistence on keeping such eccentric hours held the key to Auggie’s undoing.

She picked up the phone and dialed the number of the Insomnimania office. Maisie answered the phone. To Marianne’s surprise, Maisie didn’t sound particularly tired—just his usual, slightly stoned-out self.

“Hi, Maisie,” she said. “It’s Marianne. I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

“Naw,” Maisie said. “I don’t sleep.”

“Never?”

“Not for the last twenty years or so. Just kind of lost the habit, somehow.”

“I thought people died if they never slept.”

“Maybe they do, and maybe I did. Maybe I’m a vampire. So what can I do for you?”

“Listen, does Insomnimania
have
to go off-line right at five o’clock?”

“It is company policy, yeah.”

“Does it always go off
exactly
at five?”

“We’re fastidious about it. The way the VAX is programmed, it gets to four-fifty-nine and fifty-nine seconds, then zap, it’s gone.”

“I need you to make an exception tonight.”

“What kind of exception are we talking here?”

“Keep Insomnimania on for another five minutes.”

A silence fell over the phone line.

“You’re up to something, aren’t you?” Maisie asked uneasily.

“I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t ask a lot of questions,” Marianne replied.

“Listen, lady, take my advice and don’t try anything heroic,” Maisie grumbled. “You’re in big-shit trouble with your boyfriend as it is, and I don’t want to get you into any
more
trouble. I don’t want to get
myself
in any trouble, either. We saw you in Insomnimania tonight. We saw you and Auggie.”

“You mean you saw
Elfie
and Auggie.”

“Yeah, well, same difference. Nolan’s plenty pissed with you.”

Then a startling possibility crossed Marianne’s mind. Did the men at Insomnimania know as much about her seduction as she did? Had they followed her into the Basement itself? And if so, had they already taken some sort of action against Auggie?

“So you listened in,” Marianne said.

“Hey, it wasn’t my idea. The others ganged up on me.”

“You heard everything Elfie and Auggie said to each other in Ernie’s Bar.”

“That’s right.”

“And you heard everything they said to each other on Babbage Beach, too.”

“Hold on,” Maisie said, sounding quite startled. “You and Auggie didn’t talk at Babbage Beach. You didn’t even meet at Babbage Beach.”

“We sure did.”

“No, you didn’t. We followed you. We followed Elfie.”

“And what did you see?”

“We saw you—Elfie—walk over to a beach umbrella and sit under it, doing nothing in particular. You just sat there waiting for Auggie. You got stood up big-time.”

“Auggie was there, Maisie.”

“He couldn’t have been there.”

“I’m telling you he
was
there. And that’s where he and Elfie did their
real
talking.”

Maisie was stunned into silence for a moment.

“That bastard,” Maisie said at last. “That hacker bastard. He pulled another loop on us. An inverted goddamn loop.”

Marianne couldn’t restrain a small chuckle.

“Auggie fucked you, Maisie,” she said. “And I’m the only one who knows how to fuck him back. And all
you’ve
got to do is keep Insomnimania on an extra five minutes. Don’t turn Insomnimania off until five-oh-five.”

“You’ve got to tell me why.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not sure myself,” Marianne said.

Maisie groaned with exasperation.

“You sure know how to inspire confidence in a guy,” he said.

“So will you do it?”

“Yeah, I’ll do it,” Maisie said reluctantly.

“Do you promise?”

“Yeah, I promise.”

“And let’s just keep this between ourselves, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. I owe you a big favor.”

“How about a resplendent night of frolicking on my waterbed?”

Marianne laughed.

“Sorry, Maisie,” she said. “I’m spoken for, remember?

Maisie sighed.

“Ah, well,” he said. “Sometimes I forget that those wonderful days of free love are gone forever.”

“Don’t despair. Maybe they’ll come back.”

“Yeah, maybe. When my equipment’s too old and obsolete to even bother with an upgrade. I don’t call it my ‘Wang’ for nothing. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Marianne said.

She hung up the phone and stared at the computer screen. Could she really trust Maisie? Would he keep Insomnimania on for the extra time she had asked for? And could she trust him not to talk to anybody else—especially Nolan? Maisie had promised, but could she believe him?

She shuddered as she considered how much her own promise to Nolan had been worth—her promise to stay away from Auggie. She hoped Maisie was more trustworthy than she was.

She felt deeply ashamed of her deceptions, but even more ashamed of her outburst against Nolan on the phone. More than that, she felt humiliated, disgusted at what she had joined, what she had become, however briefly. She wanted to call Nolan, to apologize to him, to try to make him understand what had happened. But what could she say? How could she explain what had happened?

“I wasn’t myself.”

It was the literal truth, but it was also the king of clichés, and she wouldn’t blame Nolan if he hung up on her the second she said it. Besides, she still had business to finish with Auggie, which Nolan would again object to. No, she would have to make her peace with Nolan later—if she
could
make her peace with him.

I have to. It has to be possible.

Marianne looked at her watch. It was now approaching four-thirty. Time was growing shorter, and she still had no firm idea of what she was going to do—except that it had something to do with Insomnimania’s sign-off time. Following her tried and true meditation practice, she pinched her left nostril shut and inhaled. The nostril seemed perfectly clear. Then she pinched her right nostril shut and inhaled. That nostril seemed perfectly clear as well.

Perfectly balanced. That s good. I’m going to need both hemispheres to pull

this off.

She stared at the lone white dot at the center of the monitor, trying to determine its import. She was in the Basement, the center of Auggie’s very mind. But what was going on in here? At the moment, apparently nothing. What, then, was the purpose of the Basement?

All she knew for sure was that this was where Auggie’s cells congregated—where they
became
Auggie. And at this very moment, Auggie was undoubtedly present. He was always present in the Basement. But sooner or later, Auggie would have to give voice to thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and plans. How did that happen? How could a cell know when to speak in Auggie’s voice?

She felt a rush of déjà vu at this question. She had some notion that she, herself, had once done just such a thing. But when could that possibly have been?

Of course. That Quaker meeting.

She closed her eyes and remembered. Since she was going to do it again, it was important for her to remember. She had been ten years old. She had just begun to attend the silent prayer services at her family’s Friends meeting house. The adults were always seated in a circle around an oak table covered with Bibles and other books. Sometimes they sat in total silence for an hour. Other times, members were moved to pray aloud, to thank the congregation (and God, too) for one thing or another, to read from poetry or the Bible, or even to comment on some social issue—moved by the spirit to “speak from the Light Within.” Her mother said that there were always voices to be heard at meeting, spoken or not.

One Sunday, Marianne listened carefully for the voices. As quiet as everyone was, the place seemed awfully noisy. From downstairs came chattering and singing from the children’s classes. From outside came the sound of traffic and church bells. And even right there in the room, the other worshippers constantly grunted and shuffled their feet and cleared their throats and coughed. Pretty soon, she became lost in a miscellany of noises. She stopped thinking about them, stopped labeling them, just absorbed them.

At last came a burst of sound that seemed to rush through her feet and up her legs and through her abdomen until it cascaded outward through the top of her head. It was a simple sound. It was the sound of a breeze rushing through the leaves outside. Everything dissolved into their happy rustling. It seemed that everything in the universe was part of that sound.

Before Marianne knew it, she was on her feet, her eyes wide open. “There’s nobody here,” she said bluntly and confidently. “There’s nobody in this room. It’s empty. There’s just a sound, the sound of leaves fluttering. That’s all we are, the sound of leaves fluttering.” Then she added, stammering slightly at her own audacity. “There’s no God, either. There’s no one to talk to. God is just … a sound of leaves … fluttering.”

Marianne stared for a moment at the startled faces around her and hastily sat down. She immediately felt embarrassed. Why, at the most religious moment of her young life, had she just denied God’s existence before all these people? When Marianne got home, she received no scolding from her parents. But she understood, without mistake, that she had done quite the wrong thing. Marianne never gave ministry after that.

And now, how strange it was to find herself in the midst of an altogether different sort of congregation—about to minister in a much more shocking, much more dire and consequential way. And to do so, she had to become that ten-year-old girl again—willing to listen carefully and speak out of her heart.

Because, she decided, that must be how an Auggie cell knew when to “speak.” A cell would become moved by Auggie’s “spirit” and begin to type in Auggie’s words. The single cell might continue on its own, or other cells might join in, but the effect would always be of a single, unified consciousness. The
voice
would always belong to that singular, self-conscious “I” named Auggie. The more passive, nontyping cells would watch the stream of words flow by, perhaps whispering them aloud, perhaps imagining they were hearing Auggie’s voice, feeling as much a part of Auggie’s mind as those doing the typing.

This was all pure speculation, and Marianne couldn’t be sure that any of it was true, but she felt a strong, unshakeable hunch that it was. After all, she had recently been groomed for a role in this sinister society of mind, and Auggie had probably planted this very information in her brain.

What other things did that fucker do
when he was crawling around inside my central nervous system? What other land mines might still be lying around somewhere inside my self?