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."