The Glass House (3 page)

“For me? You don't even—”

“We all wait for someone.”

“What—”

“Time to take what you would think of as a leap of faith.”

“I'm not—”

“A believer? You only tell yourself that to keep yourself safe. But you came here for something quite different than safety, Mr. Decker Roberts of the Junction.”

Then, without warning, Decker gulped. He hung his head and out poured howls of anguish. “I abandoned my son.”

“The boy from the Junction?”

“Yes, abandoned him.”

“Then find him, Decker. What are you waiting for?”

He looked up. It was his friend Crazy Eddie speaking. He was somehow back in San Francisco outside the dream clinic—and Seth was gone.

Decker mumbled something.

“What?” Eddie demanded. As he took a step towards Decker his foot lift brace clacked.

Decker mumbled again.

“Time to enunciate, partner!” Another step. Another clack.

“I'll kill him.”

“What?”

“I'll kill Seth—I know it. I'll kill him.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I got close to that boy in Stanstead—I got close to that girl in the igloo. I'll kill him, Eddie.”

Eddie saw real fear in Decker for the first time. “Seth is your son, Decker, you hear me—your son.”

Decker looked at Eddie. He had his arm around his daughter, Marina. Her eyes roamed aimlessly. It occurred to Decker that it would be a life's work looking after this poor girl—it was going to be Eddie's path.

Eddie was speaking again. Decker only caught the last part of what he said: “. . . time for you to vacate the premises—maybe even the continent.”

Decker looked at his friend, but it was not his friend—it was the large white man who called himself Linwood. And he wasn't outside the San Francisco Wellness Dream Clinic—he was in Solitaire, Namibia.

“Sliding!” he shouted as he slammed his hand against the side of the Jeep.

Linwood stood back and watched intently. When Decker finally seemed to have himself under some semblance of control, Linwood asked, “Are you finally ready to learn?”

Decker heard himself say, “Yes, yes I am. Please.” But it sounded like someone else had answered Linwood. With a shock he recognized whose voice had come from his lips—that of his son, Seth.

Linwood pointed to the small door again.

“Apple pies?” Decker ventured.

Linwood nodded slowly, then looked at Decker from beneath his heavy eyelids. “Inshakha should not have told you.”

Decker didn't respond, but he thought,
So Inshakha's part of all this. Whatever this is.

“Are you ready?” Linwood asked.

Decker eyed the big man, then said, “I guess.”

“Good. Give me the keys to your car.”

“Why?”

“Commitment is the first step on the path that you are about to follow.”

Decker hesitated, then tossed the keys to Linwood. Before they disappeared into the bear paw the man called his palm, they glinted in the fading sun. The unlikeliness of this place—this peculiar oasis in the midst of the vast nothingness of rock and brush and sand, of far horizons, of a thin moon high in the sky all day long—settled on his shoulders like a heavy wooden yoke on a draft horse.

Then in the distance he heard a lion roar, and it echoed in his head—and heart—and soul.

“Does that happen often?”

“The lions?”

“Yeah—them.”

“Usually only after sunset.”

“But it's not—”

“Yes, well, things are changing.”

Sliding,
Decker thought, but he asked, “How? How are things changing?”

They were outside the small door. Linwood pushed it open, revealing a tiny but immaculately clean kitchen. “Do you know the concept of one hundred thousand kowtows?”

“No.”

“Well, you will.”

“When?”

“After you bake some pies.”

The big man opened the door and indicated that Decker should enter.

He did and was immediately adrift in the sweetness of apple preserves.

Over his shoulder he heard the big man say, “You will, Decker Roberts of the Junction, you will—and then you will hear the music.”

IT WASN'T A LION THAT
Viola Tripping heard, but something that slithered—something malevolent, at large, released . . . and searching for her.

She parted the drapes by her small bed and stared out at the thick blackness of the rural Nebraska night.

It was out there, of that she was sure.

She slid off her bed and wrapped her robe around her shoulders—such a small robe, such small shoulders—and went into the hall.

It was cold. She shivered.

At the far end she cracked open the door to Sora's bedroom. In the glow of the new moon she saw her caregiver of almost thirty years sleeping on her back. Her steady breathing and gentle snores comforted Viola.

• • •

In the morning Sora awoke to find Viola asleep in the bed beside her, her cheeks stained with tears, her fingers interlaced on her chest.

She gently moved Viola to one side and slipped out from under the covers. A cold dawn greeted her. She looked back at her sleeping charge and made a decision.

In thirty years Viola had never crept into her bed. She'd been told to report any change—and this was a change.

She withdrew the cell phone she'd hidden in the shoe box in the recesses of her cupboard and stepped outside.

She'd only used the thing a few times before, but she remembered the instructions the woman with the southern accent had given her and entered the fourteen digits that corresponded to the date and prepared to wait—she'd been told a connection would take time. It had in her previous calls.

But this call was answered before the first ring. There was an odd background hum. A cool male voice said, “Yes?”

“It's Viola,” Sora said. “Something's happening to Viola.”

“Okay,” the cool voice said, then repeated itself: “Okay.”

Sora didn't like the voice. It was somehow neutral, way too neutral, too cool, but before she could say anything—before she could ask where the woman with the southern accent who answered all her previous calls was—the line went dead, and the cool voice was no more.

WILLIAM JENNINGS CONNELLY COOLLY POCKETED
what he thought of as his “special” cell phone.
Good, very good,
he thought. The boy was still bound and asleep as anyone with that kind of sedation in his system should be.

William Jennings Connelly knew a lot about sedation—a lot. His first company patented and marketed a totally unique approach to sedation, and even after he sold the company he kept a large supply of its secret products. With the money he made from the sale of the sedation company he posted bail and then paid for the defence funds for three of the world's most notorious computer hackers. The four of them went into business together. He supplied the money and they taught him an eccentric new approach to systems integration.

He took out the phone, put it on vibrate as he saw his conductor enter the wings. He pulled back his long grey hair and snapped an elastic band around his ponytail. He shook his head to splay the lengthy grey strands across his back then stared out at the audience. As he did he slid his fingers across the well-oiled surface of his Andrea Amati cello and yet again sensed the ancient mystery within. An Andrea Amati cello was even rarer than a Stradivarius violin—and it, if not its mystery, belonged to him. To him, William Jennings Connelly. Well, not William Jennings
Connelly anymore. Now that his parents were safely in the caressing arms of dementia, the world knew him only as WJ—just WJ.

It took a lot of money to control personal information—De Beers money, Sung family money—but he had done it, and now he was just WJ to anyone and everyone who wanted to know. And they could search and search but they'd never find anything but those two initials. WJ was him—period.

His conductor entered, accepted the audience's applause, then stepped on the podium. He raised a baton and all twelve members of the chamber ensemble readied themselves.

The audience closed their programs and stopped rustling.

A moment of silence. Then, the conductor brought down his baton—and they played as one intricate, interlocking thing.

As the music rose, WJ looked around him. He was more pleased with the aural than the visual of the ensemble. In fact they were, on the whole, an odd-looking lot. He perhaps the oddest. His sinewy six foot four inch frame and grey hair down to the middle of his back drew many an audience member's eyes, but not as many as the pretty Chinese girl who played second violin—or was she Korean? He'd never spoken to her—or for that matter to any of them except to say hello and compliment them on their playing. He wondered if any of them suspected that it was his money that paid their salaries. Then he wondered if there were any female Chinese gymnasts who were also accomplished string players—a Chinese gymnast violin player, that would be perfect. He wondered if he'd respond to perfect.

After the initial crescendo he began the almost seventy bars of rest. He looked down. He wished he didn't have such tiny feet—size five shoes and over six feet tall? Ridiculous! Sometimes he wore bigger shoes with paper stuffed in the toes, but when he did he often tripped over his feet. Like a dumb clown.

The music modulated and the violas took the melody.

WJ knew that music at its heart had a “feel” and that, to his
profound frustration, he could never feel the “feel,” so he copied the others—with arithmetic precision.

He readied himself and made a perfectly timed entrance with the other cellist. They took the melody for six bars then the rest of the ensemble joined in.

It was for moments like this that he bothered with the cello—to be in the midst of the sound.

With the music all around him he could almost feel its magic. No—he could almost feel something.

As a younger man, WJ had tried to understand what was happening to him. Everyone else seemed to be finding partners and solace—and more than that, joy!—in the company of others.

He'd listen closely to the lyrics of love songs, but couldn't understand what it was they were singing about.

English literature had been his Waterloo in high school. He'd read what everyone else read, but he got nothing from the words on the page.

Movies left him cold whenever the plot degenerated to the love between the two leads. Even the hatreds in the films escaped him. He literally didn't get what the problem was. Sure, he saw the logical outcomes of being cheated or betrayed or abandoned, but he saw no joy in retribution, or hate, or love, or sex—or anything.

He was left especially cold when musicals, for no discernible reason, broke into song.
Glee
was the bane of his existence, and he'd smashed two expensive HD LED monitors when he turned them on only to find
Smash
mid yech. Yep, he'd smashed
Smash
—twice. He knew he should find that humorous. He didn't. He knew it was funny—had even read and annotated the Bergson book,
Laughter,
in an attempt to understand “funny”—but he never felt the joy of the joke.

Most confusing was that women found him attractive. At first he thought it was just because he had money and the things money can buy. But, much to his surprise, they found him a good bed
companion. This stunned him, since he seemed more and more divorced from the act of sex as time went by. He seemed to float above it, marvelling at the look on his partners' faces—what he could only assume was a kind of ecstasy, but from what he couldn't begin to guess, let alone partake in. Yet the further he abstracted himself from the reality the more they seemed to adore him—so sexy, so alive, such a great lover!

The other cello player turned the page a moment late, which brought WJ crashing back to the present. He ventured a look at the man. The guy liked to interpret the music. WJ didn't approve of that, so Mr. Interpreter wouldn't be a member of the ensemble much longer.

WJ held his bow above the strings and allowed the bass, violins, and the violas to lift him—like the young monk he'd seen on the synaesthetes' website who sang single notes up to the dome of the chapel and then seemed to rise—no, did rise, encased in the music he sang.

And such a look of glory on his face!

WJ knew from the moment he saw him that that boy was the key to opening the door that all his life had been closed to him. Even as he put his bow back on the strings and joined the andante finale of the piece he knew that it was worth every penny he'd paid, every law he'd broken, every risk he'd taken to entice and then kidnap the monk from the video.

The monk: Seth Roberts.

He remembered nights before he'd captured Seth. After a concert, back in his three-storey loft, he'd turn out the deco lamps and stare at the towers of San Francisco, which stood out like beacons against the incoming fog.

He'd push aside the floor-to-ceiling glass sliding door and step out on the wraparound deck. He'd breathe in the dampness—and feel so entirely empty that the thought of simply jumping and ending it all would flash across his mind.

He'd quickly retreat to the warmth of his vast main room and turn on the six-foot-wide gas fireplace embedded in the west wall. Turning his back to the flames he'd take in his existence—he'd had the loft completely redecorated by the very best Bay Area designers every three months for the past seven years. It always pleased him at first—he'd get the sense that he was really seeing. But the pleasure always faded—and it faded more and more quickly with each new design.

He knew that eventually he would get no pleasure whatsoever from it—or anything else.