Ashley Bell: A Novel (60 page)

The elevator arrived at the fourth floor. She stepped out of the alcove into a wide, dimly lighted corridor with closed offices on both sides. At the farther end, a door stood open. The light beyond shone somewhat brighter. She walked toward it.

She was afraid but not frozen by her fear. Wary, heedful, and prudent, yes, because Valiant girls were always wary, heedful, and prudent. She had come here to save the life of Ashley Bell, and she realized now that somehow, if she accomplished that, she would also save herself from the death by cancer that threatened her in the world that was not of her imagination, though she didn’t understand why this should be so. If she failed Ashley Bell, she failed herself.

Beyond the open door lay a very long room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling thirty feet high and walls curving to the floor. Olympian. Not human in scale. Reminiscent of designs by Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer. The ceiling and walls were paneled in light cherrywood finished with multiple coats of lacquer, glossy, with the depth of colored crystal, softly but dramatically lit by gold-leafed wall sconces that cast narrow fans of light both up and down. Here were the windows that Bibi earlier had thought were glowing spheres, mysteriously hovering in the fog, seven-foot-diameter portholes, concave from this side, the panes captured in bronze muntins. Along the center of the wide chamber, the polished black-granite floor did not reflect any of the wall lights, and Bibi felt almost as if deep space lay underfoot, an interplanetary void where she walked without the pull of gravity.

At the farther end of the room, before a wall hung with a tapestry replicating the red circle and black lightning bolts first seen in the reception hall, was an immense stainless-steel-and-black-granite desk unsuited to anyone but a mythic figure. If behind it had waited the Minotaur, with a human body and the head of a bull, or a horned mongrel as much goat as man, or some beast with furled wings and luminous green eyes, the desk and its owner would have been properly matched.

Instead, waiting for her was a tall athletic man in a slim-cut black suit of superb tailoring, a white shirt, and a black necktie, with a red display handkerchief in his breast pocket. Seventeen years later, he was recognizable as the boy of sixteen who murdered his mother and left his disfigured father for dead. He still parted his coal-black hair severely and combed it to the left across his brow, though anyone unaware of his obsession with the Third Reich would not interpret the style as an homage to Hitler.

To an extent, his good looks would insulate him from suspicion, for in this new century, image trumped substance and appearance often mattered more than truth. He had been a handsome boy, and he’d become a man with movie-star features and a glamorous aura. Hitler and most of the Nazi party hierarchy had been unattractive men, doughy and chinless like Himmler or brutish like Hess and Bormann, in some cases even macabre, and yet they had led a great nation into hell on earth and a world into chaos and destruction. Had they looked like this Terezin creature, perhaps they would have enraptured even more true believers and would have triumphed.

As Bibi approached, the elegant murderer came out from behind his desk and stood beside an office chair in which sat a young girl, her back to Bibi. The lustrous, champagne-blond hair was like that of Ashley Bell in the photograph found at Calida’s house.

To Terezin, Bibi said, “Why do totalitarians—communists and fascists alike—favor the colors black and red?”

The timbre of his voice, a masculine resonance halfway between bass and tenor, was a weapon as useful as his good looks. “Black for death, the power of life and death. Red for the blood of those who won’t respect that power. Or maybe it’s because they’re the colors of the roulette wheel, the colors of fate. Our fate is to rule, your fate is to be ruled. We are agents of fate, enforcing its dictates.”

“What a load of horseshit,” Bibi said, stopping ten feet from him.

“Yes, isn’t it? But, lovely Bibi, horseshit is the preferred language of our times.”

He swiveled the office chair, turning his captive into view. Ashley Bell’s right wrist was handcuffed to the arm of the chair.

“The girl you named by divination,” Terezin said, “spelled out with Scrabble tiles.”

“I’ll take her from you now,” Bibi assured him.

The long blade flicked from the knife that she had not been aware he held. He put the razor-sharp cutting edge to Ashley’s throat.

In the creation of this quest, there had been two authors: the Bibi Blair who wrote fiction and thought she understood herself, and another Bibi Blair, the shadow Bibi with paranormal talent, who was cloaked from her twin by the memory trick. For both of them, the one medicine that had always relieved their pain and healed their sorrow had been stories. In the creation of the search for Ashley Bell, Bibi had sought the full truth of herself, because the truth included the power to edit some things in the real world as she could edit them here—the power to edit away her cancer. But Shadow Bibi had been determined to keep the knowledge of that power in the memory hole where Captain had sunk it, because it was the cause of the greatest traumas of her life. To prevent Bibi from realizing that her real adversary was her alter ego, Shadow Bibi had to invent an antagonist, Terezin, who seemed to be her only enemy. But now Bibi and Shadow Bibi were one, united by the collapse of Captain’s trick, by the restoration of memory. An antagonist was no longer needed.

Lightly sawing the flat of the blade, not the cutting edge, back and forth across the child’s throat, Terezin said, “If I kill her, I kill you.”

For a moment, Bibi didn’t fully process that statement, didn’t realize what it meant that Terezin should know such a thing. She was intent upon the need to edit him out of this world of her shaping, applying her metaphorical eraser to him as she had applied it to Chubb Coy.

He smiled and shook his head. “That won’t work, lovely Bibi. And if you think about it, you’ll know why.”

As she sensed the story slipping out of her control, Bibi felt oppressed, claustrophobic. The architecture supported that reaction. The long cylindrical room and porthole windows suggested a vessel, a submarine, fog churning like a murky sea at the wedges of bronze-framed glass. Indeed, considering the grandness of this chamber and the megalomania expressed in its every detail, the vessel could only have been Jules Verne’s
Nautilus,
and Terezin a stand-in for Captain Nemo with a measure of Ahab.

He had said,
If I kill her, I kill you.

The meaning of his words suddenly detonated, and Bibi stood shaken as if by a psychic concussion wave. He knew the true purpose of her quest: to save herself, to free herself of cancer by some as yet not fully understood interaction with Ashley Bell. But if he was only a character of her creation, devised for her narrative purposes, he couldn’t know anything about her other than what had happened in scenes that he shared with her. He could not know that to kill the child would be to kill her.

“The cancer’s eating your brain,” Terezin said. “Day by day, if not even hour by hour, your creative power as a writer will diminish, until soon you won’t be able to construct so much as a short-short story let alone a long quest. If I kill this girl, your exhausting journey to this moment will have been for nothing. You’ll have to start over—all new characters, all new incidents, cobble together another story to save yourself. And you don’t have time for that.”

Perhaps the cancer had already metastasized to the extent that her thinking was less clear than it had been. She knew what he said was half true, but she couldn’t reason her way to an understanding of the other half. Her confidence declined, and apprehension stole upon her.

In the chair, the beautiful child maintained the expression that she’d had in the photograph: a hard-won serenity, a mask to deny her captor the pleasure of seeing her true emotions.

“Tell me,” Terezin said, “in the swoon of writing, haven’t you at times created a character who seems as real to you as anyone in your daily life?”

“Of course. But you’re not one of them.”

“And have you ever been surprised when a character evolves such a degree of free will that he repeatedly does things that you don’t see coming, that you don’t plan, but that seem truly in character?”

“Every writer who trusts her intuition has that experience. It’s when you know a character is working, is true and right.”

Even a superior smirk could pass for an amused smile on his appealing face. “And has there ever been a time, during your writing, when you’ve had the uncanny feeling that one of your characters seems almost aware of your hand in his life, of being imagined and shaped, and he rebels, makes you struggle to keep him as you want him?”

“No,” she lied. “That doesn’t happen.”

“Fiction is a dangerous art, Bibi Blair, creating new worlds populated by people as real as you can make them. Do you know how scientists explain the universe?”

She tried again to remove him, this time by the expedient of an aneurysm. Then by imagining him dropping dead of a heart attack.

He regarded her with an infuriating expression of forbearance, a smile tart with pity. When enough time had passed to make it clear that he would not succumb to editing, he repeated his question. “Do you know how scientists explain the universe?”

“What do you mean?”

“They
don’t
explain it. Oh, after the Big Bang, they can explain why and how it expanded as it did. But as to where it came from—that defeats them. Some say it came from nothing. They concoct grotesque unprovable theories that purport to show not only that something can come from nothing but that it happens all the time. Happens without reason, is an effect without a cause.”

In the chair, Ashley Bell closed her eyes in resignation, as though she detected some clue in the cadences of his speech by which she knew he would soon arrive at a crescendo that he intended to emphasize by slitting her throat.

“Quite a few philosophers,” Terezin continued, “including some of the most respected and enduring, say the world was
imagined
into existence. The scientists who insist something can come from nothing will ridicule the philosophers. But at least imagination suggests a cause and a power behind it. Considering that I exist by virtue of the story you’ve been telling yourself, I come down on the side of the philosophers.”

“What’s your point?”

He took the knife away from Ashley’s throat, allowing the light to wink off its point. “Fiction is a dangerous art,” he said again. “Creating worlds involves risks. Not risks just to readers who may be influenced toward darkness instead of light, evil instead of good, despair instead of hope, but also to the author.”

As long as the knife was not pressed to Ashley’s throat, Bibi could rush Terezin, bowl him off his feet. He might hit his head on the granite desktop, drop the knife. She could see how it might be done. Surprise him by going for the office chair in which the girl sat. Use her momentum and all her strength to wheel it backward into him. Imprudent, heedless of consequences. But considered action was always better than considered inaction. Yet she hesitated.

“When the author creates her characters,” Terezin said, “she may think she knows what suffering should and will befall those who, like me, choose power over anything else. However, with your imagination, linked as it is to paranormal abilities, you empowered me in ways you couldn’t anticipate.”

With his left hand, he gripped Ashley by her brow and pulled her head back and put the point of the blade against the skin behind her chin bone. The opportunity to attack him was lost.

“Another way to do her would be to thrust the blade straight up through her mouth, through the soft part of her palate, and into her brain. That would be quite a moment, don’t you think?”

Behind her closed lids, the girl’s eyes rolled.

Terezin’s eyes, which met Bibi’s and challenged her, were lustrous but absent all warmth, black ice.

Hitler had established the policies that led to the systematic extermination of millions, but he had never visited a death camp to watch whole families being shot or gassed and sometimes conveyed into crematoriums while half alive. He’d never visited a slave-labor camp to watch political prisoners, captured enemy soldiers, and Christian activists being starved and worked to death. When his cities were bombed, he did not once walk the ruins to encourage his citizens and improve their morale. He could order savage violence, but he was too fastidious to witness it.

If ever Terezin and his cult came to power, he would without compunction order mass murder, but he would also participate in it with pleasure.

“If you mean to kill this girl no matter what,” Bibi said, “you would’ve done that by now. You want something from me. What is it?”

“I’ll let you save her and save yourself. All I want in return is, when you walk out of this story of yours, you leave this world intact. You leave it to me as my playground.”

She thought he must be toying with her. “But this is all…imagined.”

“Somewhere Huck Finn lives in his world, having adventures Twain never dreamed of. Sherlock Holmes is solving new cases even now.”

Bibi hesitated to answer, afraid of saying the wrong thing.

He was a megalomaniac, insane by any standard, though capable of functioning—and succeeding—in society, not unlike Hitler. If he truly believed that a fictional world continued to exist when the book ended, that on some mystical plane it was real and eternally rotating on its axis, there might be a way out of this impasse.

“Leave all this intact?” she said at last, playing along with him, indicating the grand room and the fogbound world beyond. “How does that work?”

“Finish the story. Publish it.”

“You want me to sit down and write—”

“No. You’ve already imagined most of it. It’s in your head, just imagine it being on your computer, the computer in your apartment, in the world you were born into.”

She almost protested that he had confiscated the computer in her apartment and that she had thrown away her laptop, tossed it into the back of a landscaper’s truck, when she was being sought by his men in the helicopter. Then she realized that those things had happened in
this
world, in this
story,
not in the real world, where she was dying of gliomatosis cerebri.

Her confusion, even if brief, seemed to be evidence that the brain cancer was corrupting her intellectual capacity.

“I could jam this shiv into her brain through an eyeball,” he said. “I could cut off her lips first, and her nose, and you couldn’t stop me.”

“You can have this world,” Bibi said, certain that he would not be this easily deceived, that violence was coming no matter what she said or did.

His stare was glacial, but his voice contained a suggestion of childlike delight. “You’ll publish the full story as a novel?”

“Yes.”

“And this world will be all mine?”

“If it works the way you think.”

“Of course it does. You surprise me, lovely Bibi. You should have more faith in fiction. It lets you come sideways at the truth, which is the only way anyone ever gets near it.”

He closed the knife and tossed it on the desk. The weapon slid across the black granite and came to rest, spinning lazily like the indicator on some game of chance.

When he came toward her, she prepared to dodge a punch, another knife. But he only smiled and walked past and continued toward the open door at the farther end of the room.

She imagined him dead of a cerebral thrombosis. Imagined a lethal aortal blockage in his heart. Imagined with great intensity spontaneous combustion, Terezin consumed by fire, a lurching figure from which seethed blue-white flames as hot as the core of the sun, his body showering into glowing coals and ashes.

He pivoted, drawing a pistol from under his suit coat. Stepped close to her. “Sometimes a character understands the author as well as she understands him.” The muzzle of the gun, an empty eye socket in a fleshless skull, eternity rimmed in steel. He waited while she considered it and finally raised her stare to meet his. “Somehow, each time you target me and fail, I grow stronger. Do you sense that, lovely Bibi? I do. I sense it clearly.” When she said nothing, he took her silence to be confirmation. He holstered the gun, turned his back on her, and walked away once more.

She still did not believe that he was finished with her. Perhaps she should have said nothing. There was one question she felt sure that he expected her to raise, however, and if she didn’t ask it, he would conclude that her promise must be insincere.

“How do you know I’ll really do it?” she called after him. “How do you know I’ll leave this world intact for you?”

Halfway across the room, he paused and looked back. “You’re a girl who tries her best, who values truth, who keeps her word. You’re my creator, aren’t you? Well…if we can’t trust our gods, who can we trust?”

She thought of a piece called “The Creative Life” by Henry Miller, in which he had written that madmen “never cease to dream that they are dreaming.” She was surprised that those eight words should come to mind just then, so apropos to Terezin. But after a moment, she thought perhaps they cut too close to home, and she did not dwell on them.

She watched Terezin until he left the room and walked the corridor to the elevator alcove.