The Infinity Concerto (3 page)

Walking straight in the darkness was difficult. He brushed against a wall with his shoulder. The touch set off an unexpected bong, as if he were inside a giant bell. He didn't know if he had crossed a room or made his way down a hall, but he bumped against another door, fumbled for the knob, and found it. The door opened easily and silently. To Michael's left in the room beyond was another doorway leading into a smaller room. Moonlight spilled through French doors like milk on the bare wood floor. All the rooms were empty of furniture.

The French doors opened onto a bare brick patio and a desolate yard, with a brick wall beyond. The door handles felt like ice in his hands.

He left Clarkham's house. A flagstone path curved around the outside to the side gate. When he had gone through the front door there had been no moon, but now a sullen green orb rose over the silhouettes of the houses on the opposite side of the street. It didn't cast much light. (And yet, the moonlight through the French doors had been bright - - ) The streetlights were also strangely dim, and yellowish-green in color.

There were fewer trees than he remembered, and those were leafless and skeletal. The air smelled antiseptic, electric and somehow mildewy all at once, as if it had been preserved and then had spoiled for lack of use. The sky was pitch black and starless. Through the windows of the houses across the street came fitful brown glimmers, not at all like electric lights or television - more like reflections off dried blood.

He went to the front door of the house on the left. As predicted in the instructions, the door was open a crack. Warm, welcoming light poured in a narrow shaft from within. Entering, Michael saw a small table sitting on delicately curved and worked legs on the polished wood floor of the hallway. A brass bowl on the table held fruit: oranges, apples, something blue and shiny. Down the hall about eight feet and to the left was the rounded archway leading to the living room. He closed the front door.

The air in the house was stuffy. A faint mildewy smell issued from the walls and floor and hung in transparent wisps through the hall. Michael approached the archway, nose wrinkled. The house was lighted as if somebody lived there, but the only sound he heard was that of his own footsteps.

The living room's only furniture was a chair on a large circular throw rug before the dark fireplace. The throw rug was made of concentric circles of tan and black, resembling a target. The chair had its rear to him and rocked slowly back and forth. He couldn't see who was sitting in it. He had just realized he. was not following the instructions when the chair stopped rocking and began to swivel.

Suddenly, Michael didn't want to see or be seen. He ran down the hall, around a short bend and into another empty room. "Do not stop to look at anything," the note had said. He had hesitated, he told himself, not stopped; still, he felt the need to be more cautious. He made sure no one was following him, then exited through the rear door of the house onto yet another brick patio. To his left was a trellis roof overgrown with wisteria. Fireflies danced in oleander bushes to each side. Beyond the patio, glowing paper lanterns hung from strings over a stretch of flower beds.

He was startled to see someone sitting behind a glass-topped wrought-iron table under the wisteria trellis. Except for the wan flicker of the paper lanterns, there was little illumination, but he could make out that the person at the table wore a long dress, pale and flounced, and a broad hat half-obscured by inky shadow.

Michael stared hard at the seated figure, fascinated. Was someone supposed to meet him, take him farther? The note had said nothing about a woman waiting. He tried to discern the face beneath the hat.

The figure rose slowly from the chair. There was a quality to its movement, a loose awkwardness, that made his flesh crawl. He backed up, stumbled down the porch steps into the garden and twisted around to fall on his face. For a second or two he was stunned and breathless. Then he looked over his shoulder.

The figure had left the table and stood at the top of the steps. Even hidden by the dress, every limb was obviously bending in the wrong place. He still couldn't make out the face beneath the hat.

It took the first step down from the patio, and he jumped to his feet. The second, and he ran across the garden to the black wrought-iron gate at the rear. The latch opened easily and he stopped in the alley to get his bearings. "To the left," he said, his breath ragged. He heard footsteps behind, the sound of the latch. Was it the fifth or sixth gate to the left? The alley was too dark to allow him to re-read the note, but he could make out gates - on both sides. Trees loomed thick and black over the opposite wall, absolutely still.

He counted the gates as he ran. two, three, four, five. He stopped again, then passed to the sixth.

A lock blocked the iron latch. He knew instinctively he couldn't just climb over - if he did, he would find nothing but darkness on the other side. He fumbled frantically for the key in his pocket, the only key he had been given.

The figure in the flounced dress was six or seven yards behind, lurching slowly and deliberately toward him, as if it had all the time in the world.

The key fit the lock, but just barely. He had to jerk it several times. There was a sigh behind him, long and dry, and he felt a cold pressure on his shoulder, the rasp of something light and hard brushing his jacket sleeve -

Michael pushed the gate open and fell through, crawling and stumbling across broken dirt and withered stubble. The gate shut with a clang and the snick of the latch falling into place again. He closed his eyes and clutched the crumbling clods and twigs, waiting.

Several seconds passed before he even allowed himself to think he hadn't been followed. The quality of the air had changed. He rolled over and looked at the stone wall. The figure should have been visible above the wall, or through die openwork of the gate, but it wasn't.

He let his breath out all at once. He felt safe now - safe for the moment at least. "It worked," he said, standing and brushing off his clothes. "It really worked!" Somehow, he wasn't all that elated. A strange thing had just happened, and he had been badly frightened.

It couldn't have taken Michael more than fifteen minutes to do everything in the instructions, yet dawn was a hazy orange in the east.

He had crossed over. But to where?

Chapter Two

His next thought was how to get back home. He walked cautiously to the gate and peered over. There was no alley, only a broad bank leading down to a gray slow-moving river about a hundred yards from shore to shore. The river flowed hazy in the early dawn light through a hilly landscape devoid of trees, the banks lined with scrubby weeds.

He turned around and surveyed the field before him. It had once been a vineyard but was now overgrown with weeds. The weeds themselves weren't faring too well. The vines had died, leaving thick gray stumps tethered to tilted stakes, surrounded by dead dry leaves and dirt.

As the smoky dawn brightened, he saw that the garden was in the rear of a blocky rectangular mansion. He walked through the dead vineyard, squinting to make out details within the mansion's dark outline. The sun was rising behind the mansion; he couldn't see it clearly until he was about a hundred yards away.

It wasn't in very good repair. One whole wing had been ravaged by fire, leaving only masonry and charred timbers. Michael was no expert on architecture, but the design seemed European, like a chateau in France. It could have been anywhere from a century to three centuries old, even older. There was no sign of life.

He felt he was intruding. He was cold, he hadn't the slightest idea where he was, and now he was getting hungry. For the time being, his only option was to go to the house, see if anyone lived there and try to get his questions answered.

He found a narrow path through the weeds and dead vines.

The house was even larger than he had thought; it was three stories tall. The bottom story was inset five or six feet. Five broad corbeled stone arches supported the overhang; as he approached, he saw that a yard-wide chunk had fallen from the middle arch.

The air of desertion and decay didn't encourage him. The path led up to the central arch, where Michael stopped. A dark oak door was set into the wall beneath, two mirror-image whorls occupying the top and bottom frames, surrounded by intertwining serpents. Two bronze lanterns jutted from the stone beside the door, their glasswork broken and jagged.

Michael made a fist and knocked on the rough, cracked wood. Even after several episodes of heavy pounding, there was no answer. He backed away a step. To each side of the door were bricked-up windows, and beyond them more alcoves in the stone wall. He moved to the next on his right and found another door, again without an exterior handle. He tried prying it open with his fingers but it wouldn't budge. The last door on die right had been plastered over. He returned to the second door and tentatively pushed at it with one hand, feeling the smooth rolls of the serpents beneath his fingers. It swung inward with a whining creak.

He looked behind him anxiously. He was still alone, unobserved, though he couldn't quite help wondering what might be hiding in the ruined vineyard.

With a stronger shove, the door swung all the way open, rebounding with a hollow thud from the wall. He stared into a dark hallway. Back-scattered morning light allowed him to see a couple of yards into the gloom. The walls were simple brickwork, without ornament or furniture. He advanced slowly. About fifteen feet in, the hall turned a corner, and a bar light slanted across the floor from that direction.

Michael peered around the comer. Beyond lay a large and exceedingly abandoned kitchen. He stepped forward gingerly, his feet displacing great wafts of felt-like dust. Yard-wide iron pots and brick-based stoves and ovens filled a chamber at least seventy feet long and sixty wide. Light shafted down through a long, narrow horizontal window about twelve feet above the floor on the opposite wall. Apparently the kitchen was in a.kind of basement; from the front it lay below ground level.

The hall through which he had entered flanked a brick enclosure which might have been a storage locker or refrigerator. A white-enameled metal door hung ajar on corroded hinges, revealing only darkness within.

On the south side of the kitchen a stairwell rose into more shadow. He crossed the cluttered floor between the iron-grilled stove and the enclosure, feet striking mounds of broken crockery and heavy, smaller pots beneath the smooth rivers of dust. He climbed the stair.

Swinging doors waited at the top, one knocked from its hinges and propped against the wall, the other kicked and splintered askew. He pushed the leaning door aside and stepped into a dining hall.

Three long dark wood tables filled about half the space, chairs upended neatly on the table edges. Beyond the tables, the carpet gave way to wooden parquet flooring. The room could have held a respectable-size ball, and stretched to the front of the house, where tall arched windows afforded a view of the rising sun. Morning light smeared silvery-gray across the table tops.

The room smelled of dust and a rather bitter tang of flowers. He looked to both sides and decided to try the broad door on the right.

That took him into an equally decrepit and impressive foyer, with modem-looking overstuffed couches spaced along the walls beneath more tall arched windows. A demolished grand piano cluttered a small stage like a crushed beetle. At the opposite end of the foyer was an immense staircase, transplanted from a castle or luxury liner, with gold banisters mounted on turned pillars of black wood. He looked up. A balustrade ran from the staircase across the length of an upper landing.

"Ne there! Hoy ac!"

The largest woman he had ever seen leaned over the stone and metal railing of the balustrade, directly above him. She pulled back. The creak of the floor allowed him to trace her footsteps as she approached the stairs. Through the rails her shapeless body appeared to bulk in at least five hundred pounds; she stood six and a half feet tall, and her arms were thick as hams and like in shape, covered by the long sleeves of a black caftan. Her face was little more than eyes and mouth poked into white dough, topped with well-kept long black hair.

"Hello," he said, his voice cracking.

She paused at the top of the staircase and thumped her palm on the railing. "Hel-lo," she repeated, her tiny eyes growing almost imperceptibly larger. He couldn't decide whether to stay or run. "Antros. You're human. Where in hell did you come from?"

He pointed to the rear of the house. "Outside. The vineyard gate."

"You couldn't have come that way," the woman said, her voice deepening. "It's locked."

He took the key-holder from his pants pocket and held it up. "I used this."

"A key!" She made her way down the stairs slowly, taking each step with great care, as well she should have. If she fell, she was heavy enough to kill herself and bring the staircase down with her. "Who gave that to you?"

Michael didn't answer.

"Who gave that to you?"

"Mr. Waltiri," he said in a small voice.

"Waltiri, Waltiri." She reached the bottom and waddled slowly toward him, her arms describing archs with each step to avoid the span of her hips. "Nobody comes here," she said, vibrating to a slow stop a few feet from Michael. "You speak Cascar or Nerb?"

He shook his head, not understanding.

"Only English?"

"I speak a little French," he said. 'Took two years in high school. And some Spanish."

She tittered, then abruptly broke into a loud, high, sad cackle. "French, Spanish. You're new. Definitely new."

He couldn't argue with that. "Where am I?"

"When did you get here?" she countered.

"About half an hour ago, I think."

"What time was it when you left?"

"Left where?"

"Your home, boy," she said, some of the gravel tone returning.

"About one in the morning."

"You don't know where you are, or who I am?"

He shook his head. A slow anger grew alongside his fear.