Mosaic (16 page)

wasn't pleasant. She didn't like not feeling completely in

charge of her faculties; it made her vulnerable. She vowed

not to drink real alcohol again. "There-there it is again,"

she said.

"Don't you smell it?" This time the others had to

acknowledge they did. Noses wrinkled against the odor of

burned wood, rank and sour. Kathryn looked upward, eyes

straining in the murky darkness, looking for signs of an

answer to this mystery. Long shadows played on the walls,

which were painted in murals of the Greek classical style:

nymphs and satyrs romped on Elysian fields, presenting a

bizarre vision of an idyllic era which had existed only in

the imagination. It looked malevolent, somehow, in the

flickering darkness; the figures were grotesque and

distorted, and smiles took on a sardonic quality. She

shivered, and followed the others.

"Look at this," Cheb announced. It seemed to Kathryn that

his voice had become amplified, slicing through the still

house like a plasma torch. The loudness made her uneasy.

He was pointing at a segment of the mural; on it, an

idealized rendering of the very castellated mansion they

were standing in stood atop a knoll, surrounded by heather

fields.

"That's this castle, as Mr. Magruder imagined it in

Ireland. And this couple-is Magruder and his bonny bride,

the fair Mary Joanna Dugan." Kathryn stared at the couple

who stood in front of the castle, radiantly happy. The

man's arm was around the woman's shoulder, protectively;

she gazed up at him with adoration shining from her eyes.

Her hair was auburn, long and flowing, tied off her face

with a blue ribbon that matched the azure of her Grecian

gown.

He was sturdy and rock jawed, eyes glinting with deter 177

mination, mouth set in a smile that seemed to bespeak not

joy, but success. "My world," she imagined him saying,

"under my control."

"Kathryn, come on." She looked up to see Cheb waiting for

her; the others had already mounted the landing to the

third floor. She shook off a chill and pulled herself away

from the images of the couple and their dream-castle. And

then she smelled the acrid wood smoke again, stronger than

ever.

She looked up at Cheb, seeking comfort in his grave blue

eyes. Because she was suddenly very, very frightened.

"Someone's here," she whispered to him, and was relieved

when he smiled and ruffled her hair.

"Yeah," he said, "it's the ghost of Mary Dugan."

His jesting made her feel better. She was being silly, of

course. They were alone in this isolated mansion, and she

was letting her imagination play tricks on her. Ghost

stories, indeed.

She grinned back at him and they climbed to the third-floor

hallway.

Where they found the others, pale and quiet, staring down

the hall. Kathryn turned to follow their gaze, and saw what

they saw: a flickering light was emanating from the crack

under a closed door. She took an involuntary breath and

clutched at Cheb's sleeve. A coldness began seeping through

her.

To her horror, he began moving down the hall toward the

light. She pulled on his arm, hissing at him. "What are you

doing?" "No one's supposed to be here. We should find out

who it is." "We're not supposed to be here. Who are we to

police anybody else?" "I'm with her," said Blake.

"Let's get out of here."

"Are you afraid?" said Cheb, and the challenge in his

voice was unmistakable.

"Yes," replied Blake easily, thereby dissolving Cheb's

confrontation. "This has stopped being fun."

"Is that how you'd be if we were exploring an alien

planet? Turning tail and running if you didn't think it was

fun?"

"Sorry, Cheb, I'm not rising to the bait.

I'm leaving. Anybody else with me?"

There was a charged moment and Kathryn suddenly felt

things were completely out of control. She wanted to go,

but now if she said so, it would be insulting to Cheb. Why

had he turned this whole thing into a confrontation? Why

had he made this a competition about bravery? But she was

spared the need to make a decision. As the four young

people stood in the dark hallway, caught in indecision, the

door they had been staring at suddenly flung open, and a

wraith with flowing auburn hair and a blue gown came

screaming at them, brandishing a lit candelabrum. Anna

screamed and bolted down the stairs, followed by Kathryn

and Blake. Cheb hesitated briefly on the landing, but the

woman's crazed wails were menacing, and even he finally

turned and started down.

Above them, the woman stood shrieking epithets in a shrill,

high tone that made it hard to distinguish just what she

was saying. They could see now that she was old, her hair a

ratted tangle of gray, her body thin and frail. Kathryn

caught snippets of words-"out of my shame," and "never"-but

not enough to make sense of.

And then the woman threw the candelabrum at them.

Kathryn felt it whiz past her head, a heavy presence

displacing air, a rank smell of burning tallow, and then it

thumped onto the stairway, candles still burning. Cheb,

slightly behind them, sidestepped it; Kathryn slowed to

wait for him, and as she turned to look up the stairs, she

saw the draperies burst into flame.

They knew the mansion had been built before

firesuppression technology had become mandatory; they knew

the old, dry drapes and furnishings would be like tinder.

Already the flames had climbed the drape and it was smoking

profusely.

Kathryn glanced up and saw the woman, fist at her mouth,

staring at the fire and retreating down the hallway.

"We have to put this out, Cheb," she said quietly.

The panic she had felt earlier was beginning to wane as a

sense of purpose and duty overtook her.

"She'll be trapped up there and die."

Blake and Anna had stopped running and were climbing the

stairs back toward them. The fire had now engulfed most of

one drapery. "Let's do it,"

said Cheb, and they all ran back up toward the flames.

"Pull down all the drapes-we can use them to beat the fire

out."

Blake and Anna began to do that, while Kathryn and Cheb

turned to the burning drape and, grabbing hold of still-hot

chunks of the cloth, tried to tug it from its moorings.

Soot and charcoal smeared their hands, and thick smoke made

it hard to breathe; they both coughed desperately and their

eyes watered. Suddenly the burning material ripped loose

and came tumbling down toward them. Cheb shoved Kathryn

hard and she stumbled down the stairs as he jumped after

her to avoid being trapped under the flaming drape. An edge

of it caught him on the head, however, and Kathryn saw with

horror that his hair had begun to burn.

She leaped toward him, spreading her hands on his head,

blotting out the fire. There was a moment's registration of

pain, but she shut it away, refusing to focus on it.

"Let us through!" Blake and Anna were hauling one of the

drapes they had managed to pull off its tracks, and they

flung it on top of the one that was burning; then they

jumped on top of it, jumping and stomping on it to smother

the fire underneath. Within minutes, a pall of bitter smoke

hung in the air, but the fire was extinguished.

Sooty and adrenaline-fed from the ordeal, the young people

sat on the stairs, drawing ragged breaths. Then Kathryn

looked up toward the landing and saw the pale face of the

old woman as she stood silently, watching them. Kathryn's

eye caught the woman's, and she saw terror and

vulnerability. Then the woman drifted backward, out of

sight. The fire, the danger, the success of their efforts-all these had vanquished the earlier anxieties she had

felt, and now she rose, staring after the woman.

"What are you doing?" Cheb's voice was challenging,

authoritative. "I'm going to find out who she is and what

she's doing here." "We've got to get out of here."

"You were the one who wanted to go see who was in that

room." Kathryn was beginning to feel annoyed with Cheb; he

wanted to be in charge of everything.

"We have to be at our beam-out site in fifteen minutes.

That doesn't leave any extra time."

"Go ahead without me. You can come back for me later."

"No, I can't. Not without someone knowing about an

unauthorized transport." "Then maybe someone will have to

know. I can't leave that old woman here, after the fire,

without knowing who she is and if she's all right." She

held Cheb's look for a hard moment, realizing as she did

that she had never confronted him about anything, had

always deferred to what she felt was his superior

decisionmaking capacity.

For a moment, she doubted herself. Was 121

he right? Was it foolish to stay here when the safety of

home was only minutes away? When they could be out of this

place without anyone knowing they'd ever been here?

But the memory of the fear in the old woman's eyes was too

urgent to be ignored. She couldn't leave now. She forced

herself to hold Cheb's gaze.

And finally he looked away.

"Be at the beam-out site in an hour. I'll arrange another

transport." There was no bitterness in his voice; it was

completely neutral, as though they were discussing the

weather.

"Fine." She saw the others start down the stairs, and she

went the other way, onto the landing, and down the corridor

where the mysterious door stood open, spilling flickering

light onto the threadbare carpet. She moved toward it

soundlessly, without apprehension, pulled along as though

by an unseen thread.

HARRY AND KES HAD PULLED THEIR

PHASERS INSTANTLY, flung themselves against the side walls

of the stone corridor, and trained their weapons on the

Kazon.

Strangely, the Kazon seemed unaware of them, and instead

turned in place, looking around them, speaking softly to

each other. Speaking silently to each other, in fact. Harry

realized they were talking and gesturing with some energy-why couldn't he and Kes hear them?

He saw Kes looking upward and realized she, too, was aware

of something strange. He glanced back at the Kazon and now

saw that they were standing against a background of

foliage. Of course there was no foliage down here-but there

was above ground. The figures of the Kazon moved off; he

uttered a short laugh and holstered his phaser.

"What is it? Where are they?" asked Kes.

"It's an ancient device. On Earth they called it a camera

obscura. There's a lens up above, positioned so it reflects

an image onto this surface." Harry examined the smooth wall

against which they had seen the Kazon, and saw that it was

a finely ground surface.

Images projected onto it would be seen in a well-detailed

and undistorted reflection. That was why the Kazon had

seemed so real. "It's odd,"

he mused, studying the wall. "A camera obscura is primitive

technology, but this surface is very sophisticated,

composed of several hard polymer agents."

Kes looked around them, playing her wrist beacon in all

directions. "I wonder if the fact that it's here means

there's some significance to this location."

He shot her a glance. "I think you're right. The fact that

someone could be warned of activity on the surface from

here would suggest this is someplace they wanted to

protect."

They looked around to realize they had reached a

Tintersection in the corridors, with the "screen" forming

the back wall and two branches of tunnels extending right

and left from it. They began searching all the walls

carefully, running their hands over the surface, looking

for any detail, any design that might provide a clue to the

importance of this intersection.

Ten minutes later, they were still searching, when

suddenly Kes' head snapped around and she froze like a bird

anticipating a predator.

"What?" Harry said, but she shushed him, straining as

though to hear something far away. Then she began moving

down the corridor to the left, walking with a sureness that

belied the inky blackness of their surroundings.

Harry followed. Kes seemed in touch with something, and he

had learned to trust her instincts. He kept her in the beam

of his wrist beacon, and she seemed to float before him, a

dainty, weightless creature gliding in the blackness.

Suddenly she stopped, and lifted her hand to stop him,

too. Then, slowly, she turned to him, and he saw an

expression of wonder and anticipation on her face.

"Somewhere close . . . I know it's here . . .

."

"What is?"

But she kept turning in place, as though trying to tune in

to whatever extrasensory perception she was experiencing.

"I'm not sure. I hear that sound again . . . it's . . .

it's a clicking noise."

"Like a code?"

"I don't know."