The Worm King (29 page)

After seeing them to the door, the Mason
returned. Āmiria sat on her father’s bedroll with Lord Brown and Peanuts, reveling
in the extra space. ‘Haven’t you started on that loo yet? he snarled. ‘On the
double, hurry up!’ She wondered if he’d come over especially to ask her that,
and didn’t know what to say because it was pretty bloody obvious she hadn’t started
cleaning. He looked around in frustration, hands on hips. ‘And who’s got my
bible!?’

‘Hand-crank’s got it!’ yelled Tamati from a
dark spot behind Lord Brown, and fully half the gym burst out laughing.

The Mason
stormed back to his tower.

WEATHER
BADGE DIARY

It’s gotten colder in the last few days
and Francesco found a funny hole in the wall. We aren’t allowed to talk to Mr
Snow anymore and Astrid told us we must be very careful what we say all the
time, because everything is not what it seems. She is always telling us what to
do which Krystal says is because she keeps losing at cards.

Gilbert (the
waiter who likes Francesco) delivered spaghetti for our last meal and gave us
three extra blankets and dragged a mattress in from another room so Francesco
could sleep on it rather than the floor. Another man always comes too but he stays
in the hall, and didn’t even help with moving the mattress. Gilbert said it is
even colder outside and now there is a Troll living in the rubbish at the back
of the hotel. All the other waiters are really scared of the Troll.

Natasha

Chapter Thirty-Three

Fractal Analysis

Z
ip!
The room lights went off in the
blink of an eye. Forsyth took out his torch, switched it on and crept to the
window, making sure it wasn’t just his room cut off. No, despite being late
afternoon on a spring day, it was pitch black out there. Cold too. The Hyatt
had that closed-down, sour dampness of some ancient, draughty castle in the
middle of a Scottish winter.

He sat on the bed and shone the torch on the
document clutched in his left hand, wondering what the chances were of
obtaining a fractal analysis microscope on a filthy day like this. Because
those signatures simply didn’t match up. For a start, her name on the Order of
Darkness was in a totally straight line, with only the last letter raised
slightly above the others, and like that on all three pages. The torch wasn’t
helping: the piss-weak rechargeables he’d juiced up on Duntroons generator were
already fading, so he quickly refolded the Defense Appropriations Bill from his
attaché case, even nearer the PM’s signature this time, and while gripping the
torch in his teeth, held the separate documents together. There was a small gap
between the 2
^nd
and 3
^rd
letters of the signature on Snow’s
page that wasn’t apparent on the Appropriations Bill either.

He’d been through the text of the
legislation twice, and still couldn’t make head nor tail of it. The Canberra
law firm Mellon, Milosevic & Enright got mentioned a number of times, so presumably
they drew the document up, and in the normal course of events it’d be easy to just
jump in a cab, make the ten minute trip into town and speak to Mellon or Milosevic
or Enright, and all would be fine and dandy. But there were no cabs running
today and if Forsyth recalled, the block which housed the prestigious offices
of Mellon & Co was now a charred heap of bricks and broken concrete anyway.

His biggest gripe had to be with the
wrinkliness of letters. The wrinkliness of the Order of Darkness signature
appeared quite different from the Appropriations Bill. Even with a decent
magnifying glass, you’d have a shot at confirming it. Once you count the number
of wrinkles on a given letter-stroke, simple fractal theory says the forgery will
always have more wrinkles, because it’s always written slower.

Would room service be able to organize him a
lazy fractal analysis microscope? Forsyth had his doubts.

A safety pin! A drop of water in the circle
at the bottom end of a safety pin gives a respectable magnifying glass, of a
type. Not a terribly big one, but it might just do, and these rooms usually had
those wee embroidery kits which always have safety pins. Nothing like that had
been obvious on his initial check of the room on arrival, and chances are whoever
stayed here last would probably have taken it with them. Nevertheless, he checked
down behind the TV and bar fridge, where those sorts of things were prone to
fall. No luck. Forsyth shone his torch around the room, seeking inspiration.

Several minutes passed. He was about to turn
out the light to save the batteries, when a loud
Knock! Knock! Knock!
resounded
further up the corridor: fists pounding on a door or wall.  A muffled voice
called out indistinctly. Forsyth went to his door and opened it.

‘Can we speak to someone?’ a woman pleaded. ‘Hello!’
Knock! Knock! Knock!
‘Could you please get Dick?’

Snow!

Her door must be locked, which seemed odd. If
a prisoner for whatever reason, why keep her here? And “Can you get Dick
please,” didn’t sound like your classic prisoner demand. It occurred to Forsyth
that at the very least, he could go and say hello and see if she happened to
have a sewing kit.

After shielding the torch with his hand, and
padding down the corridor as lightly as is possible in size 12 combat boots, he
stood outside Room 237.
Knock! Knock! Knock!
She hadn’t heard him
approach and was giving it a decent thump. The door had an external padlock
bolted beneath the handle, confirming his suspicion she was locked in.

‘Hello there.’ He tapped lightly twice on
the door.

Silence. Ten seconds passed, then a
tentative, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Forsyth. Captain Forsyth. Australian Army,
ma’am.’

A deeper, male voice spoke quietly; the
woman uttered a short reply, then asked loudly, ‘You’re in the Army?’

He wondered how many there were in the room.
‘That’s right. I’m staying down the end of—’

Without warning a door clicked open immediately
to his right so he spun the torch in that direction. It came from the next room
along, where a man’s head poked furtively out. Forsyth didn’t shine the beam
directly in his face, because no one likes that, but the man’s skin was deathly
pale, and something else looked wrong too, with his eye . . . 

Knock! Knock!
‘Are you still there Captain?’ Forsyth jiggled the padlock, keeping his
torch pointed roughly up the corridor towards the neighbor.

‘Yes, I’m here. Is this door supposed to be
locked?’ he asked the man.

‘Yeth.’ The neighbor continued to watch, but
didn’t offer anything further. There’d be no point inquiring why the lock was on,
because there’d undoubtedly be a reason and it’d have nothing to do with him. The
man’s head and left hand were visible, but his right hand was tucked behind his
back in pose strongly suggesting he held something, so Forsyth didn’t feel
on entirely safe ground to be starting an argument.

He lifted the torch slightly, in order to
see him better. ‘I’m actually just after a . . . sewing
kit. You don’t happen to have one, do you?’ He didn’t really look the sewing
kit type, so Forsyth was hardly surprised when the man disappeared without a
word and the door closed. Or maybe he’d already used his sewing kit to try and
patch up whatever was wrong with that awful, gammy eye?

‘Who are you talking too? What did you say
you wanted?’

‘A safety pin. Do you have a sewing kit in
there ma’am?’

‘We can’t see a thing, sorry’. The
deep-voiced male spoke quietly again and the woman said, ‘Hang on.’ Perhaps a
full minute went by.
Tap, Tap
. ‘You there Captain?’

‘Yes.’

‘Down here.’ The end of a safety pin
protruded from under the door, then the whole pin popped out on his side,
pushed along by a piece of broken glass. The glass disappeared back under the
door. ‘You got it?’

‘Yes I have, thank you.’

‘There were two young girls with us, whose
parents just arrived. They took the girls at least two hours ago and said
they’d come and get us straight away, but no one’s been back since. Can you
find out what’s going on?’

He had a feeling the crusty neighbor would’ve
had his ear pressed to the door, listening to every word, so this wasn’t the
time for in-depth questioning. If the girls were moved two hours ago, that
would’ve been shortly after he’d been shown to his room, and there
had
been some noise in the corridor around then, but he’d put it down to normal
hotel comings and goings and hadn’t paid much attention.

‘What’s your name ma’am?’

‘Astrid. Astrid Simpson.’

‘Righto. I’ll see what we can do with this
safety pin then. Thanks very much for that. Cheerio!’ He clumped noisily back
down the corridor to his room.

After forty-five minutes of fiddling with
the improvised fractal analyzer safety pin device, it became patently obvious
there was absolutely no way of zooming down to the required level of detail. A
stronger torch might’ve helped, but the Brigadier took his spare. When Forsyth’s
torch had faded to virtually nothing, there was no point even staying in the
room.

So out he went.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The Great Steppey Schism

There
was movement at the gymnasium,

for
the word had passed around

That the Māoris had a bus and were getting away

L
ord Brown smiled to himself, despite the tension in the dank, stale air.
You could actually feel it, like some minute, crackling vibration seeping from
people’s pores and coating them in a brand new epidermis composed solely of
anger. Twenty-three meters away a disagreement over a blanket rapidly escalated
to a heated argument which spiraled into a fistfight within minutes. The old lady
who threw the first punch wasn’t mucking around either.

‘There be rage,’ he said quietly to Zelda. The
old lady and the man she’d attacked were pulled apart by those nearer the
action.

‘People are frustrated.’ She gazed around. ‘They
think it’s getting lighter but I’m not sure if it really is. Well, it’s certainly
not light enough to see properly yet, and no one has a torch that works, or
fuel for a lantern apart from what they’re dishing out here. As soon as you go
outside you’re just groping around in the dark, choking on all that muck in the
air and trying to find food, and water, which at least they’re giving us in here,
I suppose. You know what?’

‘What?’

Zelda lowered her voice. ‘I keep having
these dreams, about this place. That it’s an enormous coffin. This coffin with
lots of other people in it, who’re all still alive, and we’re allowed to climb
out occasionally and use the loo but when you get out, it’s even worse and you
can’t wait to get back inside. It’s so awful outside you can’t wait to get back
in the coffin. And if it suddenly
does
get completely light, right from
now, say, which I can’t imagine, then what’ll be left? How many plants will
still be alive!? And all the animals that live off them? There’ll be . . . nothing!
So we just have to sit here, in the dark, waiting to die.’

He tried to think of something positive, but
nothing sprang to mind.

‘Oh no!’ She balled her hands against her
mouth.

‘What’s wrong?’ Little could be worse than
that coffin scenario.

‘The pandas. All the panda’s will’ve gone,
and I really like pandas. I’m pretty certain all they can eat is fresh bamboo. Maybe
they’ve got more light in China? Can’t be much less, that’s for sure. We’ve got
nothing here apart from a bit of canned food and dried rubbish, which will soon
run out then we’ll starve! I don’t know anything about planting things or
growing stuff. I tell you, we’ll starve! Why’s this happening? What’ve we done!?’

She be angry too. Lord Brown put his arm
around her and rocked gently. Even through the layers of clothing he felt her heart
pounding like an overheated steam-hammer as the panic attack subsided.

The bedroll he sat on was usually occupied
by David, who’d been reluctantly hauled away on a work detail. Wiremu said
everyone had to pull their weight and the timid lad hadn’t offered any argument.
On the other side of David’s space, Jerry and his mate Ken lay sprawled on
their backs muttering every so often, sometimes in agreement, and sometimes not,
so it was general muttering rather than a specific mutter relating to a
singular issue.

Zelda had settled down so he removed his
arm, and looked around the gloomy gym.
A hundred and thirty-four?
Almost
impossible to fix with any accuracy in this insipid light. Twice in the last
three days, he’d done a rough circuit, taking along Āmiria who’d wanted to
“try some stuff from her first aid badge”. The recipients of her medical advice
were generally sceptical, and not without good reason because Lord Brown was fairly
certain the Girl Guide rulebook didn’t call for amputation as frequently as
she’d proposed. However, these excursions proved extremely useful
intelligence-gathering exercises. While patients were debating the pros and
cons of getting this or that cut off, he’d been able to assess the condition of
the populous. Of the hundred and forty-odd, Lord Brown figured perhaps thirty-five
were keen to leave as soon as the situation allowed, while the rest were
content to sit it out here for as long as they could. The first group thought
the brunt of the storm had passed, and it was time to get back out there and
restart lives, and families and jobs: the whole works.

The second, more pessimistic group,
comprising around a hundred people, thought quite differently. In their view
this was merely a plateau in the encircling horror of a global apocalypse;
what’s more, many spoke of some evil presence outside they could physically
feel.
You’d think they’d been made infants again: taken back to that point when their
nitelite is first removed and the child starts thinking about Boogiemen in the
closet, or under the bed. Boogiemen only come out in the dark, and they never
sleep, so you know they’ll get you eventually.

In the last 24 hours, Zelda had progressively
slipped from group one to group two. Of all the folk in this hideous enclosure,
Āmiria and her father seemed least likely to drift into the second group. Both
had spirit and determination in spades. Only once had he seen the girl show a
flash of fear, but at the time Lord Brown had a notion this might’ve been related
to some event in her past, rather than the current maelstrom.

Apart from the constant coughing and
wheezing it sounded quieter now in the gym than it’d been for several hours. Whenever
Lord Brown slept or rested alone for any period, he would wrap a damp rag
around his mouth to avoid breathing in the drifting sediment. They had no spare
water to wet rags so he used urine. You got used to the taste after a while,
although by putting the wet strip between two dry pieces, you hardly noticed
it. He’d tried to convince others to do the same but few had taken it up,
foolishly, he thought, because each time he moved the rag it left a dirty black
circle where his mouth had been, so he knew it was working.

Wiremu, the Hat, David and the others ort to
be back in twenty minutes. They were down the road gutting the inside of a
supermarket. The idea was to construct a larger, open indoor space akin to the
gym where people could come if they’d completely run out of food or water. However
dismantling the shelves and taking out all those fiddly stands and fittings
supermarkets have had proved considerably more difficult than expected, given
the lack of light and electrical cutting equipment. Just carrying each chunky
section of steel shelving outside to dump in the car park was a mission in
itself, and cold, numb fingers didn’t help.

Apparently when they first started sending
out workers three weeks ago, it’d been in more frequent, smaller groups of four
or five, with a single lantern. Initially this worked well because you could
have four carrying the heavy pieces and one holding the lantern. Then one lot broke
their light and tried to wander back blind, getting completely lost and ending
up on the outskirts of Tamworth jibbering senselessly before being found. The very
next day, a group of four disappeared altogether. This group
still
hasn’t
been found, and no one has any idea what happened. According to the Mason, they
must’ve come upon a house with plenty of food and a decent water tank and just
decided to sit it out. Lord Brown doubted this: the three days he’d spent “waiting
it out” in Dubbo were enough to last a lifetime. He recalled how voyagers in
days of old, when stranded on isolated islands, no matter how lush, invariably resorted
to building a raft and attempting to flee. It was simply human nature to try
and rejoin the clan, and he’d been told two of the lost four had family in the
gym, so no way would they’ve sat it out for two weeks. Maybe they’re still wandering
around out there, arms outstretched, groping their way to a slow death? After
this, the workers went in groups of seven or eight and carried two lanterns,
although the spare was supposed to be used only in life or death situations.

The dynamic of the gym changed subtly for
the better each time a work party returned safe and sound. You’d think the men
had just done a night mission over Nazi Berlin, yet they’d merely been a short
walk down the road doing semi-strenuous manual labor. In the normal course of
events it’d be a walk in the park, almost literally, because a public reserve and
one block of houses lay between the supermarket and gym. But if that lantern
they carried happened to go out, and for some reason the spare wouldn’t work,
they’d be marooned out there in the dark; up to their britches in Boogiemen . . . 

‘Are you really a Lord?’ asked Zelda,
interrupting his contemplation.

‘What’s that? Why yes, of course. Well,
strictly speaking it’s
Professor
Lord Brown.’

‘Wow. Impressive. You mean with real
students and everything?’

‘Indeed.’

‘And you’re a lord of . . . ’

‘After the education department began giving
funds to schools teaching creationism, I started my own religion. I’m lord of
that.’

‘Your own . . . religion?’

‘That’s correct. It was partly in protest at
the absurdity of creationism, and partly as a class exercise. Seemed a nice way
of killing two birds with the one stone, so to speak. We decided to call it the
Church of the Brown because it’s an inoffensive, run-of-the-mill, semi-warm color:
like most people. An obvious choice if one’s trying to grab the biggest slice
of the market, which all religions aim to do, in reality.’

‘So is Brown your real name?’

‘No.’

‘What is it?

‘Krunkle. Norm Krunkle. It’s Austro-Hungarian
in derivation, although my family’s been out here since the early 1800s. The
problem was, we didn’t think “Lord Krunkle” had the same friendly overtones. It’s
slightly on the . . . ominous side. Professor Norman Krunkle,
that worked fine; but for a religion, no. And we would’ve been abbreviated to
“Krunks”, when it really took off anyway.’

‘Did it?’ Zelda asked disbelievingly.

‘Oh yes. We had meetings: chapel we called
them, even Brown Police to oversee things and keep some semblance of order. Our
head priest is the Holy Nugget and our sacred food ended up being the prawn
cutlet. The vast majority of funding we received went towards purchasing
crumbed prawn cutlets and beer, and the university said that was one step too
far. I said my religion didn’t recognize their steppage system, and it’s been
at that stalemate ever since. The followers refer to this as the Great Steppey
Schism of the Mid-Brown epoch.’

‘How come I’ve never heard about any of
this?’

‘I believe the Chancellor’s exact words
were, “If it gets out the university’s spent this much on fucking prawn
cutlets, my arse is cactus”. So I’m effectively still on the payroll.’

The work party for once returned spot on
time. A bracing tongue of wind swirled in the open door with them and those
nearest the entrance dug deeper into sleeping bags, or pulled blankets tighter
around their emaciated bodies. The eight weary men filed in and the Mason
dismounted to consult. One of the Mason’s cronies sauntered over to join the
conversation, not with anything useful to contribute, more because he’d look like
a big swinger in the eyes of the watching crowd. Laughter erupted from the
group, and the atmosphere in the gym perked.
A hundred and forty-two
? Lord
Brown cocked his head, listening carefully. ‘Nine to fourteen percent.’ He
frowned.

‘What’s nine to fourteen percent?’ Āmiria
asked.

‘The murmur ratio. It’s nine to fourteen.’ The
girl looked blank. ‘There are a hundred and forty-two people in here, right?’

She glanced around. ‘If you say so.’

‘If between thirteen and twenty of that hundred
and forty-two look up at more or less the same time, and say something like,
“oh, they’re back!” or “good, they made it!” then it creates a positive murmur,
and others will hear it and they’ll look up too, adding to the signal and producing
your classic rolling murmur, or CRM. Anything less than fifteen percent in the CRM
ratio is generally considered dismal.’

After several minutes discussion the eight returnees
began filing down the side of the gym towards the “dining room”. Wiremu waved to
his daughter and gave a thumbs-up, then joined the end of the food line, so all
was obviously well. The girl waved back enthusiastically. The murmur cascaded
away, grinding to a stagnant halt before resurrecting and reforming itself,
just for a moment, into a low grumble. A rise in the grumble ratio is seldom
good news. Still, only to be expected: very few people enjoy seeing others
gutsing down food while they themselves remain famished, even if those
currently eating have been busting their backsides stripping a supermarket
while the ones in here have done little more than stare at the roof. No, that
wasn’t quite true; not everyone: the girl for instance, always seemed to keep
herself busy one way or another.

Lord Brown watched, trying to work out what
she was up to. She’d folded a sheet of newspaper multiple times and now pressed
the edges down firmly. Then with a kitchen knife she sliced out five squares,
each with a side of approximately 7cm. After a quick glance around, took from
her pocket a handful of dried grass and crushed twigs, which she divided into
five little piles, and began rolling the concoction into each paper square. Fake
cigarettes, clearly designed to take in some poor wretch in the midst of
nicotine withdrawals, desperate to trade anything for one final, sweet puff. They
looked of such poor quality he’d be surprised if anyone actually fell for it,
and was inclined to suggest improvements, but at the last moment held his
tongue. Let her find her own way. Learning through mistakes granted the most supreme
of wisdoms; far more precious than any tit-bit he could pass on.