Halloween III - Season of the Witch (15 page)

Cochran’s own sanctum sanctorum, no doubt about it.

From the other side of the partition came a gentle, rhythmic sound.

Challis crossed the room.

There, around the divider in the other half of the office, a green-glass table lamp burned with an undersea glow. A muffled clock was ticking faintly.

Someone was seated at the desk, back to Challis.

A crocheted shawl draped over a high collar of ruched lace. Long white hair pinned back in a bun. The easy locomotion of a rocking chair.

An old woman.

Cochran’s mother? Was that possible? She would have to be at least ninety, perhaps older . . .

With a soft snap she flipped over a card from a pasteboard deck.

A game of solitaire.

Her eyes are still good, then, thought Challis.

And her ears?

“Where’s the girl?” he said.

Her rounded shoulders did not flinch. Delicate gloved hands flipped another card.

He approached the table and stood behind her. The ticking grew louder.

“Where is she?” he said.

No response.

Then she can’t hear, he thought. But I’ve got to make her understand. She might have seen something.

He reached out and touched her arm.

Another card.
Flip.

“Listen.” He gripped firmly to get her attention. “Where is . . . ?”

The antique lace sleeve ripped apart in his fingers.

Her arm came off.

He held it in his hand, still covered by the rotten threads of her blouse. In the open shoulder-hole a blued steel spring drove an arrangement of cogs and levers and watchwork wheels. Now the ticking was quite loud. The fingers flexed and unflexed, flipping cards that were no longer there.

The body tipped out of the chair. He grabbed for it.

The head drooped at an impossible angle as the body slid to the floor, and then the head detached completely.

Cards scattered at his feet. He leaned down as the mechanism ceased ticking and lay before him in pieces, a broken doll.

The pasteboard playing card against his shoe was worn but readable. It was the ace of spades.

Another sound. In the other part of the office. He tensed.

Two black gloves caught him around the chest and lifted him from the floor. His feet dangled.

He was whirled around.

The granite face and steely eyes of the tall man in the gray suit, the same one from the motel, stared coldly back.

Challis felt fury. He bared his teeth and slammed his fist into the assassin’s midsection.

The tall man did not react. His eyes glinted humorlessly.

Then Challis was flying through the air.

This is absurd! he thought, a microsecond before he struck the bookcase and flopped to the floor.

The man in gray came after him.

Challis ignored the pain in his ribs and launched himself from the floor in a full tackle.

That took the tall man off his feet. Challis rode him down like an animal.

You felt that, didn’t you? he thought savagely.
Didn’t you!

“You son of a bitch!” he choked. “Where is she? What did you—?”

The black glove snapped onto his face.

With sudden lucidity, Challis understood how Grimbridge had been murdered. See? he thought, part of him observing as if it were happening to someone else. The way the fingers spread, going for my eyes, the way the thumb is hooking under . . .

Like a vise. Squeezing, pressing deeper.

The fingers contracted, closing into a claw.

No, thought Challis, with absolute, untouchable calm.
No! Not this way. I will not have it.

He gathered every ounce of strength he had left. His body arched and became a knotted muscle, his bones hardened, his heart pumped to the limit and the last reserve of adrenaline coursed into his veins. He felt his kidneys ache in readiness as the gloved fingers groped for his eye sockets.

He waited another heartbeat, another, another, stretching it as far as he dared.

It must be timed perfectly. He would have but one blow. It would be his last. But it would contain his whole being.

He freed one arm, raised it high, clenched his fist until it was a rock, and drove it down into the assassin’s vest, at the same instant contracting his body in a single spasm of energy.

He struck a soft spot below the ribcage. He had aimed well. He felt the cloth give way, the shirt tear, the flesh sink in and in to receive his hand. A jet of warm wetness sprayed over his arm. He grabbed at the softness inside and twisted, then ripped his hand out.

The claw relaxed.

He dropped out of the grip and rolled free.

He opened his eyes.

He saw a blur of whiteness pumping out of the abdomen, and in his own hand a mass of wires dripping with milky fluid.

It was liquid silicone.

The tall man writhed spasmodically, one arm lashing out, fingers clamping the air. The sharp smell of burning plastic stung the air.

Challis lay there, his chest heaving. His hand felt broken. He let got of the torn wires and tried to stand.

Before he could rise, a door crashed open and more gray-suited guards were on him.

This time there was no way to fight them.

Cochran followed them in.

“Clumsy,” he said, going first to the old woman.

He hefted her mechanical head and looked into her face with sadness. He clucked.

“This was a rare piece. German, the best. Made in Munich in 1685. I must try to get a replacement. My European agent, perhaps.”

Then, like a host who has been hurt irreparably by the unseemly behavior of a guest, he said, “Mr. Challis. It’s been such a long night for all of us.”

“Where’s Ellie?”

“ ‘Mrs. Smith’?” Cochran’s ire gave way to amusement. “Why, I believe she’s resting just now. Yes. Resting.”

Challis lunged for him.

Black-gloved hands threw him back to the floor.

Cochran consulted his pocket watch.

“It didn’t take you long to get here, Mr. Challis.
Doctor
Challis, I should say. It will be morning soon. Halloween morning. It promises to be a busy day . . .”

He stood over Challis, about to impart some paternal advice.

“Being a medical man, you’ll probably find some of it quite interesting.”

From the table he lifted an ornamented black box. He flapped its lip open and held it out.

“Do you smoke, Doctor?” He stroked the intricately carved lid of the humidor. “These are the very finest, you can believe me. Bog oak. From the bogs of Ireland.”

The yard was a cold gunmetal blue in the morning light.

Throughout the factory grounds work had come to a halt. Truck bodies were jacked apart from cabs, forklifts had been run to ground and abandoned, their lifting bars pointed like spears at the sky.

“Ah, but there’s no smoking inside,” said Conal Cochran. Regretfully he removed the long cheroot from his mouth and handed it to one of his bodyguards for disposal. “Has to do with dust in the machinery. I very nearly forgot my own rules, what do you say to that?”

Challis had nothing to say as the gray-suited guard crushed out the ember between his flesh-colored fingers and pocketed the remains.

“Now then,” said Cochran, “I think everything is in order. This way, please . . .”

Challis was led roughly across the loading platform to a door marked
NO ADMITTANCE.

Cochran ceremoniously unlocked it and beckoned his troupe inside.

The way was old and rickety. Except for the yardmen lined up at rigid attention, the interior would have passed for an abandoned warehouse.

“ ’Twould be nice to work them around the clock,” said Cochran, going to an anteroom. “But alas, the night is bad for them. Rust. And corrosion. The salt air, you know.”

“They’re all machines,” said Challis. “Every one of them.”

“Every one but you and me, Doctor. But you figured that out last night, didn’t you?”

The graysuits forced Challis down a long flight of stairs.

“The surprising thing is that the internal components are quite simple to produce, really. We get most of them from Korea and Taiwan. The outer features took much longer to perfect, but in the end it’s essentially another form of maskmaking.”

The stairs fed into a bunker, chilly with fluorescent light. An incongruously modern door slid into the wall, revealing an elevator.

Challis was pressed forward.

Cochran nodded and one of the graysuits pushed a button on the control panel.

“Going down,”
said a sensuous female voice. It came from the speaker grille above their heads.

The elevator dropped for a very long time. Chains swallowed to unblock his ears.

One of the graysuits sneezed.

“Bless you,” said Cochran. His thin lips drew back wryly. “Convincing, aren’t they? Loyal and obedient. Unlike most of humankind.”

The graysuit released Challis long enough to hand Cochran a set of folded white garments. Then the graysuit began to wrench an identical set of protective clothing over Challis’s arms and feet.

“Just like a hospital, eh?” said Challis.

“In a manner of speaking, yes.” Cochran dressed himself like a surgeon prepping for the operating room. “I must admit the comparison had escaped me until now.”

“And do you save lives here? Marge Guttman, for instance. Did you save her?”

Cochran wagged his head woefully. “Poor Miss Guttman. But death is curiously productive, Dr. Challis. There’s a kind of concentration of the life forces at the moment of truth. The ancient Celts studied it, but couldn’t make use of it. Lacked the technology.”

“Dust-free area,”
said the female voice.
“No smoking, please . . .”

“Would you mind taking off your shoes?” said Cochran. “My men will take good care of them for you.” He put on the last of his outer garments and faced forward expectantly.

The elevator thumped to a halt.

At that signal the ceiling panel went red and a ventilation blower whirred on, filtering the air.

Challis noticed the androids on either side of him. In the purifying light their eyes shone blood-red.

“Ellie’s father,” he said. “You sent one of these out to kill him. Then it destroyed itself. No evidence to lead anyone back here.”

Cochran clapped his hands, which were now stained red like everything else in the compartment. The skin around his pink eyes crinkled up. With his snowy hair, he looked like a monstrous white rabbit!

“Very good, Doctor! That Grimbridge, he was a terribly inquisitive man. Downright nosey, you might say.”

The red light went out and the doors hissed open. Darkness ahead. Challis was given over into the waiting hands of two more graysuits. Cochran joined them and the door hissed shut behind them.

“Come,” said Cochran. “I promised you a look at the whole process, didn’t I? My ancestors never dreamed of this . . . !”

Cochran guided them to a dim railing.

Below, on the final level, an immense room the size of a soundstage came into view.

The ringing of hammers reverberated off the high ceiling.

A huge stone megalith several times the height of a man had been erected in one area of the chamber. It rose up from the floor like the primitive gravemarker for an entire nation. Around the base a wooden scaffold with ladders and platforms had been rigged. At the moment a canvas cover of mammoth proportions was draped over the uppermost edge of the rectangular stone. The undraped surface held blue shadows in its coarse, hand-sculpted contours.

“Your ancestors never dreamed of what, Cochran? What is this place?”

“A portion of the Salisbury plain, transported to the New World. Ahh, there we are . . .”

Cochran walked Challis around the railing to afford a view of the other end of the chamber. There a dozen technicians were busy in a circle of high-intensity tungsten light, making adjustments to a bank of video monitor screens.

“How to explain?” Cochran continued. “It would seem like magic to you. Advanced technology is always magic to one who doesn’t understand it. Rather like your own profession, Doctor, wouldn’t you agree? But come along. You’ve still time to figure it out on your own. Your scientific curiosity will not be disappointed, I assure you.”

They descended to the lowest level.

Now Challis saw a team of workers chipping away at the front of the stone with hammers and precision chisels. Blue-gray chalkiness coated their tunics, their hands.

Their inhuman hands.

“From a prehistoric shrine,” said Cochran reverently. “I imagine even you have heard of it.”

Challis gazed up and up at the monolith and the rain of flintlike chips which were being extracted from the stone. Already a sizable chunk had been carved out, but tons of it were left. Enough to tag every face on earth, even generations yet unborn.

If there would be another generation.

“Stonehenge . . .” murmured Challis.

Cochran picked up a sample chip and smoothed it on his sleeve before returning it cautiously to the conveyor belt. “Devil of a time getting it here. But it had to be done.”

The conveyor belt carried the chips to an assembly area, where hands quick and sure as surgical instruments shaped them and attached them with tweezers and calipers to the backs of Silver Shamrock trade seals.

“It has a power in it, you see. A force. Even the tiniest particle of it can be devastating, given the right circumstances.”

He scooped out a handful of finished seals and inspected them approvingly. He sprinkled them back into the box and applied a jeweler’s loupe to his eye. He picked out a finished skull mask and examined the back of it for the adhesion of its silver nameplate.

“Consider the miniaturization, if nothing else,” he went on proudly. “Those Orientals are simply wonderful with their small hands. Who would have dreamed? As I say, my forebears would have been delighted. To be able to reduce an object to the size of a pinhead. Even their alchemy couldn’t do this.”

“Alchemy, Cochran? Is that what you’re up to?”

“You would call it that. But surely you don’t doubt it now. Not after you’ve seen what it can do.”

“What did it do to Marge Guttman?”