Cruelty and guilt, Palestrina thought. It amounted to Neumann saying, Here is your share.
The door opened then; Walker entered. Cardinal Palestrina flinched away from the man. Walker wore his customary gray clothing and gray slouch hat and was looking at Neumann now with a strange intensity of expectation, as if Neumann had promised him something, a gift, the answer to a question.
Neumann, consulting his seers, turned to the room and smiled. “It’s almost done now… just a few more minutes.”
The homunculi grinned among themselves.
4
Karen was not aware that she had lost her sister, or at least the awareness was not enough to make her hesitate. Her mind was fixed on Michael.
She had seen him.
It happened not very long after they entered this building. The silence of these long stony corridors had been oppressive and she was reluctant to break it; there was only the sound of her footsteps against the ugly green tile… and Laura’s, until those faded. She moved steadily and purposefully, although she had never been here before, as if she possessed an instinct of direction, a cellular map. Michael was here somewhere. She knew it; his presence pervaded the building; the air was full of him. Somewhere very near now.
And then she saw him. She saw him at the end of this corridor, where it branched in an unequal Y to the right and to the left. Seeing him, she gasped and faltered. He looked oddly far away, an image through the wrong end of a telescope. But it was Michael. There was no mistaking his lanky figure, his untucked shirt and his baseball cap. He looked toward her but seemed not to recognize her; and then—agonizingly —he was gone again, retreating to the left.
Karen stumbled, then picked herself up and began to run.
She remembered the story she had told her sister, the old woman wheeling Michael away in his stroller and how she had chased after her. It should have been the same, she thought, this running now, but somehow it was not; there was no pleasure or relief in it; only a grim and breathless determination.
The corridor twisted again and she followed it in a long downward spiral. She could not estimate how far she had come or how far she might yet have to travel. There was only the image of Michael in her mind.
And then the corridor straightened and she saw him again—heartbreakingly, even farther away. “Michael!” She called out his name, and her own voice sounded strange to her, as shocking, in this dim door-less hallway, as a gunshot. “Michael—!”
But he was running… running away from her.
She gasped and began to sprint. She felt a kind of submerged panic, something that would be panic if only she could think more clearly. The important thing—the only thing that mattered now—was to keep him in sight.
She ran as long as she could run. Periodically Michael would stop, look back, and he was too far away for Karen to see the expression on his face, but she was afraid that it was a kind of taunting smile, a way of beckoning her on. It was cruel and she could not understand it. Why would he act like this? What was he thinking?
But there was nothing to do but follow.
When she could not run any longer she careened up against a stone wall. The wall was cold against her shoulder but she couldn’t move, could only huddle against the pain of her struggling lungs. She looked up finally and saw Michael again, closer now, his face unreadable; she staggered forward and saw him sidestep through an archway. It was the only door Karen had seen in this labyrinth and she approached it warily. She understood now that something was wrong, things had gone wrong in a fundamental way, a way she had not foreseen. But here was Michael again —she saw him clearly through the empty doorway— alone in a small room watching her impassively, waiting for her. Karen made a small noise in her throat and stepped inside, reaching out for him.
But it wasn’t Michael after all.
She blinked at the image, which would not focus. Suddenly this was not Michael but, horrifyingly, a thing the size of Michael, but smooth poreless plastic, and she recognized it: it was Baby, it was the doll the Gray Man had given her all those years ago, grotesquely inflated and staring at her through painted china-blue eyes.
Karen bit the heel of her hand and took a step backward.
And then Baby was gone, too, and there was the final image—a fleeting impression—of some wrinkled, shrunken creature grinning madly at her… and then the space was simply empty, vision dispersed like smoke, and she was alone in the room.
She turned to leave. But she was tired. She was as tired as she had ever been in her life, and her feet wouldn’t do what she meant them to do, and so she sat on the cold stone floor and folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes—just for a minute.
5
“It’s done,” Neumann said.
Cardinal Palestrina listened to the cheering.
Chapter Twenty-two
1
Karen wasn’t certain how much time passed.
She woke and slept and woke again, but the waking was partial and transitory. When she came fully to herself at last, she was in a room larger than the one she remembered; and there were old-fashioned-looking wooden chairs, and a single door—and she was not alone.
Laura was here, too, blinking at the light. And Michael. She felt a rush of gratitude. They were together. That, at least.
Tim was there, too.
She sat up—she had been lying on the cold floor— and made her way to one of the chairs. Michael, doing the same, gave her a look, a sort of “I’m all right,” and that was good. Laura struggled to her feet.
Tim, who was standing already, and whose expression was calm and endlessly patient, said, “You’ll feel better soon.”
Karen could not at first understand what he meant. It was like a message from another planet, a foreign language. Feel better soon? Was he insane?
Laura said, “You knew… you were a part of this.”
Tim did not deny it. Karen looked at him with her mouth open. Well, maybe he was capable of that. It was possible.
He said, “Tell me if there’s anything you need. If you’re hungry or you’re thirsty. You don’t have to suffer here, you know.”
Laura shot him an outraged look. Karen expected some kind of outburst from her. But all she said was “Go away,” and her voice was flat and distant.
“I’ll be back,” Tim said, “later.” He left through the room’s single door. And Karen understood, without having to think about it, that she would not be able to follow, that the doorway was barred to her, that this was a prison and that none of them would be allowed to leave.
They had not been beaten or intimidated or tortured; only confined. Karen tried to explain the trick that had been played on her, the false image of Michael; but Michael began to look shamefaced and she stopped, because he wasn’t responsible and she didn’t want him to think he was. He was apologetic: “I only meant to find out what we were getting into. I came here because I wanted to save Laura the trouble.”
Laura said, “If you hadn’t gone they would have used me. A lure.” She added, “Michael, I appreciate what you did. It took courage.”