Dark Matter (46 page)

Cain entered the pass code, his fingers
obscured by his back. The door opened, he looked back, tipped an imaginary hat,
and left.

The silence that then descended was
the heaviest Rasputin had ever known. It would take diamond to cut it. He wasn’t
sure he was up to it.

Dee had not moved since she had spat at
Cain, not even to watch him go. She looked crushed. That alone was agony to
see.

Rasputin shrugged his arms up and down. He
had been going at it a for seven minutes that seemed like seven hours, enough
perspiration gathering at his temples to drip down his cheeks, when Dee
stirred.

“For how long has Reim been dead, do you
think?” She said it so detachedly.

Rasputin kept shrugging and writhing. He
matched her tone: “I guess from sometime after he called you at the farm.”

“And Jordy?”

He didn’t reply.

“What are you doing?” she said, with the
same apathy.

He saved his breath, kept working at the
cable.

“You’ll never get it free in time.”

He glanced at the vial. Before the blood
had begun to roar in his ears, he had fancied he could hear the mechanism
ticking. He pushed it from his mind, and shrugged more violently.

The cable was slipping ever so slightly. In
seven minutes it had perhaps gone an inch down his trunk. (He wondered if this
was what an antelope felt like as it beheld the boa’s gaze.)

He needed another foot to free his arm.

He needed millimetres to reach his pocket,
the pocket containing his knife.

With one last heave, stretching the cable
to the extent his strength allowed, and with the slightest slippage, he was
able to tuck his hand backwards and fish in his pocket. His fingers felt the
smooth texture of the folded portrait of his sister, and below that, the cool
surface of the knife’s handle.

He drew it out, panicking for a moment as
it slipped―to drop it now meant death. He manoeuvred it in his palm, his
fingers working to turn it like a series of autonomous armatures, until it lay
along his hand. He worked at the collapsed blade, awkwardly, pinching and
pushing up with his thumb and index finger. It came open with a faint snapping
sound.

He spent a handful of seconds to steady his
nerves, and then began sawing on the cable.

Cain had looped it three times around their
trunks. He felt each strand go―one, two, three―then the whole cord went lax.

He sprung up and untangled himself.

Dee sat, unmoving.

He began to speak, but, instead, put his
arm around her, drew her up, and walked her away from the bench. She stood
standing where he left her.

He went back to the vial, approaching it as
if it were a coiled cobra.

“Better get this thing off,” he said and
picked up the vial.

He gripped it and was about to tug when Dee
spoke.

“Wait! You don’t know that it doesn’t
spring if tampered with.”

That was true. He
hoped
it wouldn’t,
but hoping was not knowing.

“Okay. Then let’s just get out of here.”

As one, they whirled and hurried to the
door. By the clock, they had six minutes left―if Cain had been telling the
truth. But at the same moment they realised, absurdly, comically, that the
ten-digit code was required not only to enter, but exit.

Rasputin laughed.
Is this what hysteria
sounds like?

Dee spun on the spot.

“Can we put it in the wet room?”

“Needs the code.”

“What about the hatch?”

“I’m guessing it isn’t air tight. Cain was
right: that thing goes off in here and they’re not letting us out.”

“Fire alarm?”

“Probably lock-down.”

She turned back to the door.

“Do you remember the code?” she said.

“The first three digits only―I didn’t see
the rest.”

“How many goes do you get?”

“I don’t think it matters. Couple of weeks
ago I could have told you the odds on guessing a seven digit number.”

“A couple of weeks ago you probably would
have known the number.”

His rueful smile collapsed as he saw the
truth in that.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay, what?”

“Get the vial, and get ready to rip the
timer off.”

She ran to the vial, picked it up, holding
it the way she had held Cain’s gun.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“Try the basement door.”

Her look of puzzlement vanished as she
evidently recalled their conversation in the car.

“What if it is locked?”

“We’ll have to find a key.”

He began to focus inwardly, not knowing how
he could crack that inner world he could
feel.
It hovered, near but
beneath an impermeable barrier through which his will would not seep.

“Wait,” Dee said, interrupting his attempt
to calm his mind.

“What?” he said, irritation riding over
panic.

“What do you know of Reim? Perhaps there is
a key.”

Precious seconds merged with the past, as
the clock’s hand hastened around its face.

He knew he didn’t know Reim’s birthday, and
even if he had, he wasn’t sure how it could be turned into a ten-digit number.

Then an epiphany, a vision, filled his mind
with its effulgence. He remembered the sunlit scene of the first day he had
sailed with Reim, the coarse feel of the mainsheet in his palm, the smell of
rotting kelp in his nostrils―and Reim’s finger pinned to a brooch inscribed
with a single Greek letter: the letter Pi.

Pi was a number.

“Pi!” he yelled in excitement.

He entered the number as fast as precision
would allow: 3141592653.

Nothing happened for a moment. Then a
speaker above the keypad bleeped denial.

He put a fist to his head and began pacing.

“Too easy,” he said. “They probably wouldn’t
even let him use it.”

“Another number, then? Something less
famous?”

“No. It has to be something to do with Pi.
It was close to an obsession with him, a career never followed. The number, its
history, the people surrounding it. Pi was his special treasure, and a link
with one of his sons. He knew it to the thousandth decimal place.”

He punched his forehead.

“I’m an idiot. I know the first three
digits of the pass-code. I saw Cain key them in: 101.”

“Somewhere after the decimal place in Pi,
then?”

“Yeah―Pi’s irrational: it goes on forever
behind the decimal point. Maybe it’s a sequence in Pi’s tail that starts with
101.”

“That’s your key.”

He closed his eyes and began again to calm
his mind. As he strove to empty it of competing thoughts, fear of the clock’s
progress kept disturbing him in little adrenaline loaded jabs. Each tick was a
pebble tossed into a pool of water he desperately wanted still so he might see
his reflection. Memories disturbed him too, from the farm, following
hibernation, when he had first placed weight on his leg, and felt the familiar
juddering run up it; the wild look in Reim-Cain’s eyes that night in the
darkened bowl of the front yard; Dee, slumped and trussed in the chair, emptied
of vitality. These memories and countless others fluttered through his mind
like night insects, leaving trails of disturbance on the surface of his mind.

What eventually drove him to inner
stillness was the thought of the virus Cain had escaped with. Compared to that,
his own life seemed...small. The strength of that revelation liberated him from
besetting distractions. His mind calmed.

The image of a solitary door formed.

He knew at once there was no impediment to
opening it. It had no keyhole. He had but to open it and enter, and find what
he needed.

He stretched out a hand, then hesitated.

He hunted for the source of the uneasiness
that crept over him. Clues to it were impressed on the image of the door. The
door had been impacted from behind. Red paint had flaked off its surface under
the blows.

It was not a real door of course, merely a
concrete-looking representation for an abstract idea, a tangible model for an
intangible reality. Something had set a guard here. A queer smell wafted upon
the air, as of something run amok, of rotting food. He toed ground that was
slick, water mixed with oil, and tasted cordite at the back of his throat.
Above all, he sensed dissolution.

In a flash of insight, he realised that he
himself had set this guard.

Intuitively he had known that what he was
attempting held danger, had known it within moments of waking from hibernation.

Cain’s story had bolstered this caution.
Those who returned to the dweoming well exposed themselves to risk. Those who
habitually drank again of the water that had succoured the fertile ground of
their mind to the gifting’s harvest did not escape unscathed. In the final
state, they became unhinged. They began to rave.

Rasputin’s saw how right his sense of being
de-centred from a vast machine had been. And now he was attempting to put
himself back in the centre of things. Back into the machine.

He braced himself, a hand poised before the
door’s handle, fearing it to be live with a thousand volts. He gripped it,
turned and entered.

The view that confronted him was both
familiar and new. He was once again within the eye―the realisation thrilled
him. But all was not well.

The eye appeared diseased. Its once clear
lens was dimpled, glaucomal, and marred down one side by an arching vein of
opacity. Its walls still fluxed, transmuted and became fluid, but the
spiralling, liquescent arms it sent searching inward broke apart, shedding
drops of great pulsing globules, black as basalt and glossy. They hung like so
many rogue planets, obscuring his view.

Beyond the eye still floated his memories
and every kind of mental particulate, a riot of colour cavorting undimmed, but
it was a riot indeed. The stars had let go their constellations and roamed
freely. The skeins of memory stuff linking one to another were intact, but
snarled and tangled. It was as if a tornado had landed in the Smithsonian.

He watched the depths of his inner world
and felt the sickness of impotency. He swore.

“Rasputin?” It was Dee’s voice. It was
pushed to a lower register, and wavered, as though travelling through churning
water. “We only have five and half minutes.”

“Make it five, to be safe,” he replied, his
voice sounding unfamiliar, as though he held books ajut his ears.

He ignored the chaos surrounding him, and
focussed his will upon the eye itself.

He spoke, one split personality to another:
“Find me Pi.”

The eye began to turn, and soon lost any
affinity with the ocular. The sphere contorted as the membrane lost even a
vague semblance of coherence. The space within flattened as the top and bottom
began to twist in different directions―he felt as if someone were grinding a
boot in the bowl of his skull.

The pain became overwhelming. He withdrew
his will.

The eye moved a moment longer, then bobbled
and became still.

“Four and half minutes,” said Dee.

“Shit.”

He gritted his teeth and commanded: “Pi,
now dammit.”

The eye writhed again, and he writhed with
it. Its motion sent shockwaves into the panoply of all he was, causing yet more
turbulence among his mental detritus.

Gradually, the top of the eye lost its
contrariness, slowed its counter-motion. It stopped, poised, and began to turn
in the reverse direction. It caught up to the lower half, and the eye
ballooned, regaining its spherical shape. He felt the pain slacken.

The eye began drinking the distance between
it and an object. It sipped at it in fits and starts. The force of its passage
drew other entities into its slipstream, to clash and juxtapose idiotically
around him: a man in a shoe store pressed hard upon his big toe―“See, Mrs.
Lowdermilk, one foot is longer than the other”; a wasp crawled over his arm
stop-start, antennae twitching, mesmerising him until it unsheathed its sting;
a snatch of his mother’s voice, “Dear boy—”

These stray memories peppered his attention
until the eye slammed into something vast. The impact split it open like an
over-ripe watermelon, and its destruction spilled him into the void. He spun,
floating, until by force of will he stilled himself, created a ground to stand
on and a gravity to tie him to it.

Only then did he look for what he had
collided with.

His mouth fell open. Towering over him was
a creature of the menagerie tended by the man. It had the form of a dragon.

“Four minutes,” said Dee.