The Live-Forever Machine (15 page)

“I don’t know, Eric; I think we should get the blueprints.”

The overhead lights in the workshop flickered, then flared. The bulbs exploded. Eric protected his face against the shower of glass.

“Electricity’s gone,” he said, carefully shaking splinters of glass out of his hair and clothing.

“It’s starting,” Alexander said, so softly his words were barely audible.

“He must be plugging into the city’s wiring,” murmured Chris.

“There’s no time for the blueprints,” Eric said. “We’ve got to go.”

“Wait a second—just like this?” cried Chris, holding out his empty hands.

“What would you suggest?” Alexander asked mockingly.

Chris flushed. “I don’t know. But something.” His eyes flicked across the workbench. “Anything.
That.”

Alexander picked up the wood chisel and examined the long, sharp edge. “You think this would serve you well, do you? You can imagine yourself heroically driving this into Coyle’s immortal neck?” He slapped his hand palm down on the table, raised the chisel and drove it into his flesh, so forcefully that Eric could hear the metal blade bite into the wood of the workbench beneath.

“Shit!” Chris gasped, his eyes wide with shock.

Eric watched, sickened, as Alexander withdrew the chisel. There was very little blood, only a long red gash in the middle of his hand that already seemed to be closing over, healing, until soon there was only a strip of shiny pink scar tissue.

“That is what it is to be immortal,” Alexander said, throwing the chisel back onto the table.

“This is utterly crazy,” Chris said, unconsciously rubbing the palm of his left hand. “This is so damn crazy.”

“Surprise will be your weapon,” Alexander said, beginning to cough again. In horror, Eric watched as a bloody stain appeared on the handkerchief. It was far worse than the fleeting gash the chisel had made—this was blood coming from deep inside.

“Yes,” Alexander said huskily, catching Eric’s eye. “I’ve been sick for more than sixteen hundred years now, since before I made myself immortal. For whatever disability or disease you have when you make yourself, you carry with you for eternity. It’s the wasting illness, the consumption. It won’t kill me, but neither will it leave me.”

Eric swallowed. A tremor of fear moved through his body. Chris is right, a part of him was saying; this is crazy and dangerous. He gritted his teeth, tightened his whole body to stop the trembling inside. He had to try to save museum. It was the only thing left. The unchanging things he’d looked at his entire life, the dates. Everything else was falling apart. His mother, his father. Think of the dates. Battle of
Waterloo, 1815. Sinking of the Titanic, 1912. There, that was better. The dates never changed.

He looked at Chris. “We should go find Jonah,” he said.

They found him in the ventilation duct, sitting on a stack of sodden newspapers, making a knot in the rung of a rope ladder. A steady stream of water from outside licked around his garbage bags. Eric could hear the rain, amplified through the metal tunnel, knocking leaves off trees, battering the ground.

Jonah finished tying his knot and then looked up. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see them, Eric thought. With a crooked grin that showed a mouthful of discoloured teeth, Jonah pointed down to the grille in the floor. The rain water swirled through the steel mesh into darkness. Eric couldn’t hear it hit bottom.

“Can you take us down?” he asked. “Show us where he is—the machinery, the noise?” He had no idea how he should talk to the half-crazed Jonah. Leave out words longer than five letters? Make hand signals?

Jonah nodded thoughtfully, as if weighing a very small child’s ridiculous request. “All right,
Ishmael,” he said. “All right, Odysseus; all right, Aeneas; all right, Marlowe.”

Chris wrinkled his face at the smell of the man’s breath.

Jonah prised off the metal covering with long, dirty fingernails, and deftly tied one end of his rope ladder to a pair of metal loops. He tested the knot, then tossed over the rest of the ladder.

“Down and down and down,” he sang as he swung himself into the shaft. “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea!”

Eric didn’t give himself any time to get scared. As soon as Jonah’s head dipped out of sight, he grabbed hold of the ladder and carefully lowered himself through the opening. He could feel the rungs go taut, then slack, then taut again as Jonah descended with chimpanzee ease. Eric’s arms trembled, and he could feel the tendons on the inside of his elbow standing out like steel cable. Fear or weakness? Both, he decided with disgust.

A warm drizzle of rain water fell over him, dampening his hair and clothing, trickling down his sleeves and collar onto his bare skin. He looked up and saw Chris climbing down above him, silhouetted against the square of light from the opening.

“Careful!” he called out. “You nearly stepped on my fingers.” His voice sounded hollow and metallic, bouncing against the metal walls.

A humid stench wafted up in sickening waves. The ladder swayed and stretched. With every fearful step Eric took, it got darker, until he could barely see his own hands clamped around the rungs. He heard a distant rumble through the shaft. The subway. Reflexively, he thought of his father. Had Dad really come down here once, to the very bottom? He caught himself wishing, for just a second, that his father were with them now, guiding them through the darkness. He forced the thought out of his mind, concentrated on the ladder.

His foot prodded empty air. His hands instinctively tightened like vises around the rope. Bottomless pit. Dream free-fall. He couldn’t stop the panicked cry that escaped his throat.

“What’s wrong?” came Chris’s startled voice.

Before Eric could answer, he felt Jonah’s malodorous breath against his face and a hand closed around his thin arm, urging him gently off the ladder. He stepped to the floor, his heart still clattering.

“It’s all right,” he said to Chris. “It’s just the ladder; it ends here. You can step down.”

They were in a tunnel with a low ceiling—no
higher than six feet, he guessed. Wet ran down the concrete walls, glistening darkly between the pipes and cables, dripping over rusted valves and wheels.

“It stinks down here,” Chris said.

“It’s the gas,” Eric told him, “mixed with this stale air.”

Jonah tapped his knuckles against one of the pipes. It gave off a hollow ring. He cocked his head to one side thoughtfully and flicked another pipe. A slightly higher tone rang out. He struck a third pipe and noted its sound. Then he started slapping at all the pipes at once, as if he were playing some bizarre musical instrument, laughing gleefully.

“Oh, geez,” Chris groaned. “An utter nightmare.”

Jonah stopped abruptly, and started along the tunnel. “The village,” he said. “Family and friends.”

Eric hurried after the muttering man. What was Jonah talking about now? Mice darted across the floor, disappearing through crevices in the stone, and he saw a rat perched on a cable, gnawing through the insulation. At least Eric couldn’t smell the dank stench anymore. He felt slightly unreal, cut off from the world, as he had in the cellar.

“Why isn’t Alexander down here with us?” Chris violently knocked a low-hanging cable out of their way. “He’s using us.”

“He can’t risk it,” Eric reminded Chris. “He told us why.” But he knew Chris was right. Alexander cared only about getting the scroll back. He’d lived too long to care about people; Gabriella della Signatura had been his only mistake. How could loving someone be a mistake? Eric shuddered in the damp heat. Don’t think about it, he chided himself. Battle of Hastings, 1066. Coronation of Charlemagne, 800.

“What if something happens to us?” Chris said, coming to a stop. “No one knows we’re down here. And he’s not going to tell anyone.”

“You’re right,” said Eric impatiently. Jonah was ambling on ahead, getting swallowed up in the darkness. “He is using us. He doesn’t care what happens to us as long as we stop Coyle from translating the scroll.”

“Then why are we doing this?” Chris demanded.

“If we get the scroll back, the museum’s safe,” Eric told him. “Coyle wouldn’t risk burning it down if the live-forever machine were still inside.”

That was only part of it, though. Eric didn’t want to see Alexander destroyed, even if he was crazy and ruthless. At least he believed in
something. He believed in the objects, the past, the dates. Hardly anyone cared anymore. All people wanted was shopping malls and
TV
disasters. Be careful, he told himself, you’re beginning to think like Alexander. And Dad.

“Come on,” he said to Chris. “We’ve got to catch up.”

Jonah was waiting for them up ahead, doing chin-ups on a pipe. He did five more, then dropped down and scurried away, mumbling about the rain.

At last the tunnel opened into a large chamber. Dark shapes shifted in the gloom. Eric’s skin crawled. There were other people here, sprawled on tattered blankets or inflatable air mattresses, huddled in small groups, eating and drinking out of dented tin cans, talking quietly. A few people read tattered paperbacks in the flickering candlelight. Eric recognized the man who preached the wrath of God on the street corner outside the farm house. And the woman digging her fork into a tin can: she was the one who spent whole days shaking her fist at billboards, shouting until spittle flew from her mouth. In the corner was the street vendor who arrived at the museum every day with a strange three-wheeled trolley that he rode like a bicycle. And over there, the young man who wandered through the city streets with his imaginary dog.

The vagrants were noticing them now, twisting around for a better look. As Jonah left his side and went towards them, Eric wanted to plead, Don’t leave us standing alone like this. It was stupid; what did he expect, anyway? For crazy Jonah to protect him from all the other crazy people? For a moment, he wanted to run from this subterranean madhouse before something terrible happened.

“I think this is the part where we get robbed, tied up, and left in the dark for the rats,” Chris whispered.

Jonah was talking to the vagrants in turn, touching someone’s shoulder, whispering in someone’s ear. Eric’s heart contracted as the billboard lady shuffled towards him, stooped under the weight of layers of clothing and a parka. How can she stand it in this heat? he wondered. She peered into his face and then grabbed his wrist. Eric flinched, ready to break free, but she was only shaking his hand as if congratulating him, muttering something inaudible.

“This place is nuts,” Chris said when she’d tramped away. “How’d they all get down here?”

“Like we did, I guess—storm drain grates, manholes.”

Eric noticed that a few of the vagrants were sitting on the gutted casings of televisions. In
one corner, a rusted bicycle frame had been stood upside down and turned into a kind of clothes rack. An ironing board was being used as a shelf for tattered paperbacks, chipped crockery, bent knives and forks. An ancient record player had somehow been converted into a hotplate.

“Where did they get all this stuff?” he mumbled, gazing around the room.

Piled against the far wall of the chamber was a huge junk heap. He walked closer. His eyes picked out a child’s mitten, a three-legged coffee table, a clock with no arms, a woman’s purse, a doll’s head, a ragged copy of
Moby Dick,
a pair of glasses, a school textbook, a scarf.

“What is all this crap?” Chris said disdainfully.

They must have been collecting it for years, Eric thought in amazement. All these bits of people’s lives, forgotten in bus shelters and subway stations, thrown out in back alleys and garbage dumpsters.

He couldn’t help thinking of Alexander’s cellars, the heaps of beautiful old things. What was the use of them when they were hidden away? No one would ever get to see them, no one would ever touch them except Alexander. At least the vagrants had found something useful to do with their old things.

Jonah was picking through the heap, bending closer to look, slipping things into his pockets.

“Hey, take a look at this,” Chris said, edging forward and pulling at something from the vast pile. “Now we’re talking!”

It was an old-fashioned machine gun, right out of a 1930s gangster film.

“Wonder if it—?” Chris squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. He shook the gun violently and tried again. “Busted. Well, this is definitely coming with me.”

“Why? It’s not going to do you any good—it wouldn’t help even if it did work,” Eric told him irritably.

Chris shrugged. “Makes me feel better.” He grabbed an old tablecloth from the junk heap and ripped off a broad swath for a shoulder strap.

“We have to go,” Eric called out to Jonah, afraid that he’d forgotten them. “How do we get down to the storm drain?”

Jonah shuffled back towards them, his cupped hands filled with garbage.

“Um, thanks,” Eric said, holding out his own hands as Jonah let the debris fall into them. He jammed it hurriedly into his pocket. Jonah then cornered Chris, who looked dubiously at the dusty gift cascading into his hands. As soon as
Jonah’s back was turned, Chris let it all drop to the floor.

“The storm drains?” Eric said again hopefully.

Without a word, Jonah headed towards a corridor leading out of the chamber.

He’d lost all sense of time.

It could have been twenty minutes or two hours; Eric didn’t know anymore. Jonah had led them through a maze of low corridors, down flights of crumbling steps, singing scraps of songs Eric had never heard, laughing just to hear his own voice echoing back at him.

The sound of water had been getting steadily louder. Eric could hear its hollow metallic rush as it tumbled through hidden grates, bubbled through unseen pipes. He watched it seeping down the tunnel walls, dripping from the ceiling and pooling underfoot.

Jonah stopped and pushed a piece of corrugated metal away from the wall, revealing a skeletal metal stairway that twisted downwards. The sound of rushing water rose up to them like a geyser.

“Down here?” Eric asked wearily.

Jonah turned and started back the way he’d come.