From Black Rooms (11 page)

"N
o," he croaked. "I--I sent it back. I sent all of them
back. How did you...?"

"The same way we did the last time. Plucked it right off the wal of Drumlanrig Castle." Actual y, the genuine
Madonna still hung in its home, safe and sound, but
Wax had no way of knowing that. Pancrit hadn't

wanted to take either the time or risk required to steal Wax's "children" back from their respective museums, so he counted on Criswel 's forgeries to persuade the dead scientist to cooperate.

"Beautiful, isn't she?" he said, admiring the Madonna. Criswel real y was a gifted artist in his own right; it was rather a shame that he would suffer the same fate as the other subjects of the failed gene therapy. Stil , he would last long enough for Pancrit's purposes.

"Leonardo's work is truly unmatched." Pancrit selected the flask of yel ow fluid from the table of torture implements. "One might even say...irreplaceable." Wax squirmed in the wheelchair, gaze darting between the painting and the bottle. "What are you doing?"

"Seeing how much of an art lover you real y are." Pancrit loosened the eyedropper that served as the flask's stopper, fil ed its glass tube with amber liquid. He held the dropper above the picture and lightly squeezed its rubber bladder until a yel ow tear dangled from the glass tip. "Now...perhaps you'l consider rejoining our little team?"

Wax panted as the amber drop quivered with surface tension. "I can't--"

"Oops!" With an insouciant twitch of his hand, Pancrit let the drop fal on the painting's frame. The sulfuric acid hit the ornate scrol work with a sizzle, the golden paint bubbling to evaporate into gilded smoke.

The dead scientist wriggled and whimpered as if the acid had landed on his skin. "Stop it!"

"Ah-ah." Pancrit lowered the dropper over the canvas and coaxed another drip to its drooling tip. "Settle down now."

Wax froze, mewling, as if afraid the vibrations of his movement might dislodge the acid droplet. "But you
can't," he protested, like a child who hasn't yet learned
that rules can be broken. "You and I--we don't matter.
This matters."

"Does it? Destroying those test subjects at White Sands mattered more to you than this masterpiece. Avoiding your obligation to the project matters more to you than this triumph of the human imagination. Whatever

happens to this painting wil happen because you want it to. So let's see just how much it does matter to you.

"What should we do, Barty? Dissolve it?" Pancrit raised the acid flask, then indicated the other implements at his disposal. "Burn it? Slash it? Your pick." Wax blubbered, his gaze fixed on the dropper of acid. "I
told you, the treatment doesn't work! There's nothing I
can do...

Pancrit sighed. "There's that negative thinking again." He wiggled the dropper, and Wax shrieked as the acid on the tip shivered. "Al right! Al right! I'l try. Please...leave it alone."

Pancrit grinned. "We've readied a laboratory for you, Dr. Wax. I trust you can start immediately?" The dead scientist jerked hard enough against the bonds that held him that the entire wheelchair rattled. "If I ever--"

The Corps Security agents moved to flank him, stun guns ready.

Pancrit swung the eyedropper back toward the painting.

"You were saying?"

Wax seethed but remained stil . "I am at your service,
Mr. Pancrit."

"Now you sound like a team player." Pancrit placed the dropper back in the flask. "We'l cal you when we need you."

Evan Markham's head snapped back, drawing breath as if for a sneeze. Block, the sumo-shaped orderly, leaned close, his stun gun held within an inch of the Violet's pulsing throat. Before it could spark, however, Evan exhaled and righted himself in the wheelchair, glaring at the Corps Security agent with his customary hostility.

"There a problem?" He cast a glance at the stun gun and the guard withdrew it. Evan waved his bound hands, and Wax's bread-bag hair tie fluttered from his

unclenched fist to the floor. "You can take these things off anytime now."

The Security agents sought authorization from Pancrit, who nodded. Tackle grabbed a box cutter from among Pancrit's torture tools and sliced the plastic bands off Markham's wrists and ankles while Block kept his stun gun close by.

The Violet stood and shook the circulation back into his fingers. "You know Wax is holding out on you, right?" Markham's idle comment excited Pancrit. "Why? Did his thoughts give anything away?"

"No. He was fighting hard not to think about the project, which is how I could tel he knows more than he's letting on."

Carl Pancrit smiled, his hunch confirmed. He stooped to retrieve the twist-tie. "We'l see whether the good doctor is more forthcoming in his work. If not, we'l have to stage a more dramatic showing of this

painting."

"So, am I dismissed?" Markham made a move toward the door, only to have Block stand in his way.

"Not until I'm done with you," Pancrit said. "Needless to say, you'l have to summon our dear Dr. Wax on a regular basis until his research is complete. But I also require your services for the recruitment phase of our project."

" 'Recruitment phase'?" The madman sounded more annoyed than curious.

"Yes. We need volunteers. Test subjects with a psychological predisposition to accept the results of our therapy. We've tried using unwil ing subjects-prisoners and so forth--but the results were not...satisfactory." Pancrit tapped a finger on his forehead to clarify his understatement. "They weren't prepared to have their perceptions opened in that way. We need people for whom the change would be

welcome."

"You mean people who want to be Violets," Evan said. Pancrit grinned. "Exactly."

The Violet Kil er exuded icy confidence. "I know one."
8

A Prime Candidate

GOSSAMER GLOOM, dampening the khaki military

fatigues of the hirsute man who lurched up University Boulevard, one dirt-darkened hand cradling a stainstreaked paper cup of coffee. Day after day, he rinsed out the same cup and took it back to the supermarket deli down the street, where they refil ed it for free, assuming he was a homeless veteran. A decade after the Seattle police had shot him in the leg, Clement Everett Maddox stil walked with a limp that slowed his gait and garnered him a disability check every month, which he tried to stretch as far as possible. Today, however, the misery of smarting joints and sopping clothes made him wish he'd simply paid the two bucks to get his java at the yuppie bistro across the street from his electronics shop.

A side street led Maddox to the entrance of Clem's Gadget Garage. The paper sign taped to the inside of its glass door once read TEMPORARILY CLOSED, but

years of sun exposure had faded the penned letters to near invisibility. The front window display stil offered a petrified edifice of black-and-white TVs, eight-track tape players, Beta videocassette machines, and other obsolete devices--not one of which had sold since the store's "temporary" closing. Luckily, the landlord didn't care about the state of the business as long as Clem's rent checks cleared each month.

A gifted electrician, Clem used to enjoy a lucrative career as a retailer and repairman, but that was before his wife, Amy, died of breast cancer. Before he became obsessed with tuning his radios and televisions to what he believed to be the frequency of her soul's

electromagnetic energy, attempting to bring her back as a transcendental broadcast. Before the Violet Kil er framed him for murder and the Seattle cops blew a hole in his femoral artery.

Shivering and cursing as he entered and relocked the door behind him, Clem swigged his coffee, which had already gone cold and bitter, then shrugged off his wet jacket. He tried to excite himself about the long night of work ahead, but the thril of discovery had pal ed before the desperation of defeat. The cops had confiscated al the touchstones he'd col ected from the Violet Kil er's victims, leaving him with no way to study the souls of deceased Violets--the key to his theory of electronic communication with the afterlife.

Forced to rely on the knickknacks he'd accumulated from common dead folks, he spent fruitless hours

scrutinizing the spattered blankness of snow-covered television screens, listening endlessly to the hissing interference of the radio frequencies between stations. The dreary lack of progress made him doubt his

theory...and even his sanity. Where before he saw the suggestion of faces in the flickering pixels, he now saw only the impenetrable fog of a cathode-ray tube; where he once sensed the whisper of insistent voices, he now heard only the meaningless fuzz of static.

While there was stil a bleak gray dusk outside, it was already night in Clem's Gadget Garage. The rectangle of the doorway to the back room shone with the bluish pastel shimmer of the stacked television sets Maddox always left on, and he trudged toward the light,

sneezing from the dust and mold that thickened the shop's cold air. Maybe he'd forget trying to talk to the dead for one night: just change the channel of one of his TVs to some dumb sitcom, nuke a dinner in the micro, and work up a good beer buzz until he passed out for the night. What the hel --sounded like a plan.

Clem passed through the doorway's arch, tossed his wet jacket on a pile of dirty clothes beside his cot, and squatted to open the smal icebox in the corner. He swapped his cold coffee for a cold beer, placing the java in the fridge to reheat in the morning. Clem popped open the can and started to guzzle, but the sight of a silhouette next to his on the wal made him choke and spew.

"Welcome back, Mr. Maddox," a voice said from behind him. "I've been waiting."

Clem spun around to see a tal , wel -dressed man

outlined by the rows of speckled, glowing screens that lined the shelves at the opposite end of the room. "Who the hel are you? How'd you get in here?"

"You can cal me Dr. Amis. Carleton Amis." The stranger squinted at one of the televisions as if peering into an aquarium. Like al the others, the set had a personal article from a deceased person--in this case, a Raggedy Ann dol --tied to its rabbit-ear antenna with a piece of wire. "And as for how I got in, wel , as I like to say, there's no stopping good news."

"Get out. Get out before I cal the cops." Amis shook his head sadly. "Real y, Mr. Maddox! I would think you'd have even less of an affinity for the police than I do."

"What do you know about it? Who told you about me?"

"A mutual friend." Bathed in the television's fluorescence, the stranger's face looked as rapturous as Clem's once did, when eyes stared back at him from the on-screen blizzard, when mouths gaped, yearning to scream their secrets. "You know, we have a lot in common," Amis observed. "We share a fascination with the tissue-thin barrier that separates our world from
theirs--and we both want to penetrate that barrier."
Comprehension made Clem narrow his eyes. "You with the Corps?"

Amis laughed. "I am with the Corps but not of the Corps, if you get my meaning. The N-double-A-C-C

wants to maintain its monopoly on postmortem contact, whereas you and I want to, shal we say, democratize the gift of necromancy." He indicated the TV nearest him. "It's a shame the Corps didn't back your research into electronic mediumship. I find it immensely

interesting, if a bit clumsy." He ruffled the yarn hair of the Raggedy Ann touchstone, lashed to the antenna like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.

Despite the disil usionment Clem felt about his work, he bristled at the snub. "Look, you people had your chance. I ain't giving you my discoveries, so take your money and shove it."

"You misunderstand me, my friend. I didn't come here to demand. I came to give." Amis strol ed over to the workbench and gestured to the corkboard where

Maddox had pinned a crazy quilt of newspaper and

magazine clippings about the exploits of famous

Violets. "After al , would you rather see your late wife trapped behind the glass wal of a video monitor...or feel her inside you, the way a real conduit does?" Clem didn't realize he was shaking until he heard the sloshing of beer in the can he stil held, forgotten, in his right hand. "What're you talking about?"

"Simple, Mr. Maddox. I can make you what you always wanted to be. Question is...how badly do you want it?" Amis fingered the touchstone attached to the television on the workbench--the one given a place of honor, apart from the others. Nudged by his touch, the

diamond on Amy's engagement ring twinkled in the

electronic moonlight.

9

Unwelcome Roommates

OF THE TOPLESS BLOND woman perched on the

overturned milk crate with the pigments he'd mixed on his palette, blinked his aching eyes, and swore. It's
wrong, wrong, wrong, he thought, daubing in more
peach tone with his brush.

Lately, it was always wrong. As the shade of his irises shifted inexorably toward the violet end of the

spectrum, so did their light absorption, continual y changing his perception of color. It drove him nuts-especial y when he was trying to reproduce the subtlety of the hues in Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Desperate to put aside the unfinished Rembrandt for a while, he decided to try his first original painting in years, but it was giving him just as much of a headache.

The woman on the milk crate posed in the fashion of a Greek goddess, her dark roots and metal ic green

toenails notwithstanding. Calvin had folded and tied a white bedsheet around her waist as a faux toga, turned her head to the left at a demure angle, and instructed her to lift one elbow over her head as if stroking her own hair. But now she twitched and fidgeted, shifting her thighs from graceful to bow-legged. "Are you almost done, Cal?" she carped. "My arm's tired." He blinked again as the light in the apartment seemed to waver in intensity. The cheap green contact lenses he'd bought to hide his altered eyes didn't help, either. "Just hold stil , Trank."