Authors: David Sakmyster
Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Paranormal & Urban
Chapter 26
Victor waited uncomfortably up at the Summit Grove at the top of Solstice tower. He didn’t like sitting, but didn’t want to be seen pacing or looking out of place. The breeze was serene, the birds and buzzing bees in perfect harmony with the trees and bushes, the fragrant lotuses and holly, and the view was spectacular. But Victor was on edge, scared. He had failed. Hadn’t foreseen that Mason would do anything but wallow in his misery and wait to be picked up. And now he had done the unthinkable. Stumbled onto the one secret Solomon couldn’t have anyone unearthing. It was all Victor’s fault. Well, not all of it. How had he found out?
Was it Hespera? How deep did her betrayal go? It had to be her; she must have gotten Mason some information before they had found her out. Of course she was working with the opposition. But …
Suddenly Victor realized he wasn’t alone. The birds took wing and the bugs silenced their buzzing. The terrace was still, painfully quiet.
A lone blackbird alighted on the wood-carved chair, directly in the shade, glaring at him.
Victor bowed his head and looked at his shoes. He couldn’t stop his trembling.
“I am sorry.”
When he looked back up, Solomon sat in the chair. Wearing all black, at first he was hard to pick out, with just his head visible and his hands floating in the dark.
“What happened? And speak fast, I am expending considerable energy to be in two places at once.”
Victor swallowed hard. This was magic of the highest order, something he could never even contemplate. He preferred to think it might even be a trick, done with holograms, projectors and speakers. Maybe it was so, but he couldn’t tell.
“I think it was the rogue. Hespera. We took care of her, but found out too late.”
“I rely on you, Victor, not to be late.”
“I know. I failed you.”
“Where is Mason now?”
“Inside, we believe.”
The shadows deepened and Solomon’s eyes withdrew. “He must be getting help. I haven’t been thorough enough either, it seems. That will be remedied soon. But first, time to bring home our wayward bird.”
Victor glanced to the side, averting his eyes. He saw the edge of the roof and worried still if he might be swept over in a sudden angry gust for his incompetence. “What can I do?”
“Go to San Diego General Hospital. Take Gabriel. And wait.”
“For what?”
The shadows fluttered with the sound of wings beating, and Solomon leaned forward, his eyes taking on pure blackness.
“For my instructions. And be ready, there may be a strong test waiting for you.”
Victor bowed his head. A crow launched into the air and the darkness shifted. When he looked up, he was alone again on the rooftop.
Chapter 27
Upstairs, Mason found more dust, and precious little else on the main floor besides covered furniture—a few couches and a dining room table. The grand piano was in surprisingly good shape, however. Mason lifted an edge by the keys and tapped a few. Certainly out of tune, but he could hear the potential and imagined the music that might have graced this house’s past.
He tried to picture the hand that wielded the crayon that wrote Solomon’s name on that rocking horse. Was it just coincidence? Mason didn’t even entertain the notion. He was given this location, sent here to find out something firsthand about Solstice. Discovering Solomon’s name here could not be anything but what it was. He lived here, surely, as a boy. Did that make him a relative? Foster child? True son of this Palavar, one who later changed his name?
That answer would have to wait. The Palavars seemed to have left in a hurry. But the larger question remained. What had happened here? Several years of unusual weather leading up to that four-pronged tornado assault that somehow spared this house. It was like being struck by lightning and surviving. Four times.
Mason tapped out a section of out-of-tune “Chopsticks,”then headed for the stairs. The banister was weak, the screws coming loose from the molding. Sticking to the center panels, Mason climbed, noticing faded square sections on the walls where pictures must have been hung. The second floor landing creaked just as Mason saw a figure standing to his right, coming out of the shadows.
He launched himself to the side and slammed against a wall, then scampered back until he realized no one was coming after him. Just a sheet over something. He got up slowly, feeling ridiculous, like Shaggy jumping at shadows in a Scooby-Doo cartoon. Lifted the sheet and saw a beautiful grandfather clock underneath. Ornate numbers and a gold leaf plated face.
They left that too, he thought. What
did
they take? Or did they think they were coming back someday? As he moved farther down the hall and the soft light dimmed and the gloom deepened, he thought about Solstice and wondered if they were looking for him now back at Lawton. And for a moment, he thought of something more disturbing.
Why hadn’t they called?
That would have been the normal thing to do, find out where he was and why he wasn’t at the runway.
They would have called. Unless they already knew he wasn’t there.
Unless they knew he was here.
He took out his phone and looked at it. GPS tracking? Did they have his location? He stood there, wobbling, thinking of the Star Chamber and all the surveillance systems, the weather satellites and meteorological stations; and he had the sudden notion that not only could they track him any time they wanted, but maybe Solstice’s overall aim was something far more sinister than mere data collection. Big Brother on a global scale, perhaps?
He was about to pull the backing off of the phone and yank the battery, hoping that would put an end to any traces, but he realized if they had been tracking him, the point was moot right now.
Instead, he turned on the flashlight function, and in the lengthening shadows he stopped at the end of the hall and tried the two doors.
One was a completely empty master bedroom and bath. The other … a kids’ room. Again, full of dust and some torn old books. A frame for bunk beds, which gave Mason pause. The flashlight’s cone of illumination caught the west wall and something on the ceiling: a mobile, one of planets revolving around a sun. Saturn had fallen and was on the ground in a corner. Mason was about to leave when the light caught something else on the wall.
More writing? He came closer, then knelt down near the metal bedpost. He aimed the light directly at the wall, imagining the bed, when it was made and the mattresses covered with boyish action prints, would have been pressed up against it, just below where the black marker sketch began.
His blood chilled. He was sure there had been an attempt to paint over the drawing, but time had worked its spell and what was covered had endured while the latex paint had peeled away, flaked and revealed not the whole thing, but enough.
Four angry black swirling masses, clearly intended to represent tornadoes.
In the middle of the tornadoes: a hastily drawn A-frame house. In front of the house, between two smaller trees (young willows), was a circle of stones. It could have been Stonehenge in any other setting.
Inside the circle stood a stick figure, a boy with his hands raised. Squiggly lines issued out of his mouth toward the direction of the largest, closest tornado.
Mason looked hard at the drawing, feeling a sense of grand significance approaching. He thought of Shelby’s paper, of the shamans of early Briton, these nature sorcerers. Druids. The boy in the circle …
Solomon.
What was he doing? Was it just an overactive imagination? A boy making sense of the frightful wrath of nature, and by surviving the experience, attributing his survival to supernatural powers? Is this what had set Solomon on his current career path?
Mason kept looking at the sketch. The stone circle in particular. He stood up and peeked out the window after rubbing off a layer of dust. Between the now much larger willow trees there were what he had first taken for bricks, arranged in a low fence.
Remnants of a true
henge
, dismantled and demolished?
Possibly, but still … was this what he was meant to find? He looked at the sketch again. Now he had the sense that it wasn’t about fantasy, not meant to be some wild flight of boyhood imagination. It looked more like he had drawn this as a chore. A project. A lesson, something he had done in successive tasks.
The tornadoes, appearing from different vectors … It was almost as if … Mason thought about shooting ranges, recruits at a police academy, gun drawn waiting for the metal cutouts to pop up from any direction, having to be ready to deal with anything.
Was that what this was?
A test?
Mason felt he was on the verge of figuring it out, how it all fit together: not just Solomon and Solstice, but Shelby and Gabriel, the U.N. And Mason himself.
Why did they want me?
Was Lawton supposed to be my test?
He looked again at the stick figure screaming at the tornado, and now imagined himself in its place.
But then he saw something else—a slight red smudge beside the drawing of the boy. He scraped at the area with his fingernail. Scraped a little more as the old latex paint crumbled and scattered and then he stepped back, mouth open.
There was another stone there, this one lying flat like a table.
Or an altar.
And there was another small stick figure lying on it, but with Xs for eyes. And a lot of red trickling from a jagged line over its chest.
He looked again from the altar to the boy, and realized he held something small and pointy in his upraised right hand.
Suddenly the light flickered and a call came in.
Speak of the devil
, he thought before he looked at the screen. They must have found me.
But it wasn’t Solstice.
The caller ID said:
San Diego General Hospital.
He answered it, even as he knew, knew what they were going to say. And he was racing for the stairs before the doctor on the other end even started talking.
Chapter 28
He spent the entire flight on the phone and trying to get some kind of update from the staff. All they told him first was that Lauren had been found by a neighbor who Mason would have check on her when he was out for too long. Emergency medics worked on her in the ambulance and the early diagnosis was that she had suffered a brain hemorrhage.
Fearing the worst, fighting off every kind of suspicion and conspiracy, his brain swam with theories about Solstice, about Solomon and this Palavar. About stone circles and weather manipulation. In between calls to the hospital, he finally got a hold of Gabriel. His son was there with her, so at least that was something. But they weren’t talking to him either, not while Lauren was in surgery.
For the rest of the flight, Mason had time. On his laptop, he searched further into the Department of Agriculture’s holdings and cross-referenced tornadoes and weather modification. Nothing there, but the Department of Commerce, in conjunction with the Navy, had undertaken what was called Project Stormfury, which remained in operation from 1962 to 1983. Stormfury was an attempt to weaken tropical hurricanes by flying aircraft into them and seeding them with silver iodine, hoping to freeze the super-cooled water inside the eye and, it was thought, lead to a disruption of the hurricane’s inner structure. In reality, there wasn’t enough such water to be effective, and the hurricane’s behavior was too chaotic and intense for any attempt to be judged meaningfully different than if nothing had been tried.
Mason knew of some other earlier attempts at weather control as well, but despite millions of dollars and the highest of hopes, science just couldn’t compete with nature. Statistically and micro-physically, science was outmatched every time and the results were inconclusive at best, dangerous and wasteful at the worst.
That wasn’t to say there might not have been other projects, still declassified. Mason considered the farmhouse, the tornadoes and bizarre weather over the years. How would the government have reacted to what they must have tracked and documented on their own? Obviously they moved in and bought out the property at the very least. Palavar, by all accounts, made his own fortune by placing huge bets on commodity prices, unerringly guessing at weather conditions that would benefit or plague the commodity, and riding the wave of selling or buying accordingly. But did the government threaten him because of his success? Bring legal action unless he divulged his secrets?
Surely they couldn’t overlook the fact that four devastating cyclones had hit the same area at the same time, and Palavar’s home, which seemed to be the epicenter, was spared. Mason imagined teams of scientists and soldiers storming the place, searching for technology they could possibly appropriate for weather modification, national security and defense.
Did they find anything? And if not, was it all ascribed to luck and investment prescience when it came to the weather? Maybe Palavar made them think that way.
And maybe it wasn’t Palavar, Mason thought chillingly. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so foolish as to bring all that scrutiny to his front door and then have to deal with the full force of the United States government.
Somehow he had survived it. Somehow, against all odds …
Mason thought for a moment. Thought about the small band of unarmed druids on Anglesey Island, standing up to the Roman force.
Was there a similar blanket of wool pulled over the invaders’ eyes on Palavar’s ranch? A cloud of misdirection and confusion while the true power moved elsewhere?
Still lost in these thoughts, Mason didn’t realize the plane was in descent.
He was home.
O O O
In the hospital waiting room, he expected to find Gabriel, but all the chairs were empty and no one at the reception desk had seen him recently. Mason tried calling his son but it kept going to voicemail. Lauren was in ICU still and he was promised that he would hear as soon as she was out. In the meantime, he could wait in the room they had prepared for her.
Inside, he found someone waiting for him. It wasn’t Gabriel. Not even close. But the man in the dark, sitting in corner beside the empty bed, was undeniably familiar.
“You,” Mason said, staring at the black face pulling itself into the light.
The Haitian man smiled and twirled thin cane. “Come inside, Mr. Grier. We don’t have a lot of time.”