“Do you notice a pattern in the victims?”
“No. Three were human, one was a Choom, and the latest a mutant.”
“So there’ve been five. My fellow prisoners weren’t sure if it were only four.”
“One of them died while in solitary confinement, so that one was less conspicuous.” Zaleski looked Stake up and down, lips twisted sourly. “Why so curious… detective?”
“I told you – I’m just looking after my own skin.”
Suddenly the medical unit’s overhead lights flashed as if they might extinguish, fluttered precariously for a beat or two, then regained their full strength. Static shot through Stake’s holographic image, which Zaleski hadn’t banished yet, and it blinked out of view a moment before returning as before. Stake noticed how the physician flinched as if startled, and glanced nervously toward the ceiling.
“It’s been doing that since I got here,” Stake said. “Is that natural?”
“Nothing is natural about this place,” Zaleski muttered, as if only to himself.
Of course Stake picked up the physician’s unhappy vibe, and ran with it. “I’m a little concerned about the stability of this pocket we’re in.”
Zaleski said, “Well, I’ll tell you this… we do have some strange ‘weather,’ if you will. Activity in the interstitial matter that we call storms, for lack of a better word. Disturbances.”
“Are these storms responsible for the power fluctuations, then?” Zaleski didn’t answer, so Stake jumped to another question. “Do you think what’s happened to these men might be linked to the anomalies? If the disturbances affect electrical sources, might they be attracted to the electrical activity in a living body? Reach out and… I don’t know… disrupt the victim violently?”
“That’s a wild and unsubstantiated theory, Mr. Stake.”
“Better than no theory, which is what you claim your stance is, doctor.”
Finally Zaleski dismissed the holograph of Stake’s head. “You’re all better, Mr. Stake. You can return to your cell now.” He looked over toward the door to the medical unit, where the two guards who had escorted Stake here had stood waiting all the while, and motioned for the man and robot to come forward to get their charge. Then to Stake he said, “I suggest you try to avoid getting into any further fights. It isn’t wise to make enemies here.”
SIX: THE LOOKING GLASS
In the cell in which his cousin Chowder had recently died – now thoroughly cleaned, and repainted besides – Null said to Stake, “Be careful, friend… everyone in Orange Block gets pressed into the Orange Bunch gang, but a couple of the mutie members work for me as inside informers, and the word from them is Mr. Fetch is getting more nervous about you testifying against him. Apparently he wants his new friends to eliminate the threat.”
“Great.”
“Just stick close to us and they’ll be less likely to make a move. You’re doing the right thing, working for us. So tell me what you think the doctor knows.”
“I don’t know what he knows, but he sure seems to know something… enough to threaten me before I left. The deaths are an uncomfortable subject to him.” Stake related how the conversation had gone, even to the point of describing their discussion about the anomalous power fluctuations. Null said everyone had taken note of these disturbances, which had become more frequent in the past few months, and they didn’t inspire confidence. Then Stake told the mutant, “A funny thing happened when I was leaving the med unit. The robot guard suddenly stopped dead and wouldn’t budge; he kind of just stood there staring at me. And his eyes – you know how their eyes glow red? Well, his eyes were flickering. So I asked the thing, ‘Are you all right?’ And he spoke to me.”
“What’d it say?”
“He said, ‘Your kind are not the only prisoners.’”
“Huh,” Null said. “What did it mean?”
“I don’t know. An existential robot?”
“But you think it was having one of these power disturbances.”
“Yeah… for a second. Then he seemed to snap out of it and acted normal again.” Stake shrugged. “Something’s in the air.” He turned to face the other two occupants of the room, both seated on the edge of a bunk: Billings, and the mutant called Blur, who of course was convulsing and whipping his head madly.
Billings smiled apologetically. “So how’s your nose?”
Stake ignored him and said to Null, “Now I want to talk to your pal Blur.”
“You can try.”
“I have to. He’s our only witness.”
Stake stepped closer to Blur, looking down at him. “Hey, buddy. You know who I am?”
“Jerry… Mistake,” the mutant garbled. “Jerry Mistake…”
“Close enough. Do you know I have Caro turbida, Blur? I’m like you.”
Spittle flew from the mutant’s mouth as he became more agitated. “No… no… I’m like everybody… everybody’s inside me…”
“We’re prisoners in our own bodies, aren’t we, Blur? But we have to fight this thing… this curse we have. Try to make it work for us, right? Try to make it into a gift, instead.”
“I saw the ghost… ghost… saw the skeleton ghost…”
“Yeah, that’s what I want to talk with you about. But I want you to settle down so you can think clearly. Can you do that? Can you slow yourself down?” Stake reached out and laid a gentle hand on the mutant’s juddering shoulder. “Look at my face, Blur. Focus on my face and calm down, brother. Hey, I can do it. I don’t have perfect control, but I don’t let this thing control me, either. Can you slow it down? Can you look straight in my eyes?”
Null began to say something, but cut himself off when it became obvious that Blur’s head was not thrashing as fast as it normally did. As his head motions became less rapid, the other three men caught clearer glimpses of his repertoire of faces. There was an elderly woman (his mother?)… a small child (himself at an early age?)… a black man… a woman Stake thought he recognized as a porn actress. But the succession of changing visages slowed, as well, until Blur’s head finally stopped whipping, and his features stopped altering. Yet instead of Blur revealing his true self – as if that were irretrievable to him, as if he had never even owned his own countenance – the face that ultimately looked into Stake’s eyes was his face, that of “Jerry Mistake” as Blur called him, in Stake’s neutral “factory setting.”
Before Stake could protest, Blur spoke in a surprisingly level, quiet tone. He said, “Before I saw the skeleton, I saw a fish. A white fish, swimming around in the air near the ceiling.”
“A white fish,” Stake echoed, glancing up at the cell’s ceiling, where there were inset light strips and a single air vent.
“Yes. And then… and then a bigger shape stepped out of the air, stepped out of the air right inside our cell. The fish swam down to the bigger shape and became part of it. It was like a skeleton, but not a human skeleton. It was like a demon’s skeleton. And it wasn’t really solid. It glowed like a ghost.” Blur’s eyes started darting back and forth. His eyelids fluttered.
“Then what happened?” Stake encouraged him, to keep him from slipping back into chaos.
Blur’s gaze snapped into focus again. “The skeleton stood there in our cell and it looked at me… it looked at me… it knew I was awake. But it didn’t come here to my bunk.” He patted the mattress he sat on, then pointed across the room. “It went there, to Chowder asleep on his bunk. It stood beside him. It looked around at me… with that demon head… that skeleton demon head.” Darting eyes again.
“Yes, Blur? And?”
“Then it reached down with its hands… it touched Chowder’s head with both hands… and I tried to scream but I couldn’t! I couldn’t scream!”