Broken Pixels (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 4) (11 page)

He shuffled closer, holding his hand just a few inches from Mara’s face. In his palm was a faint purple light, but Mara couldn’t see its source. Sam approached from behind and grabbed the man’s shoulder, yanking him away from his sister. The man staggered backward and fell to the sidewalk.

Sam stepped over him, stood next to Mara and said, “Are you all right? Was he attacking you?”

“I don’t think so. He’s got something in his hand he wanted me to see,” she said.

The man continued to hold up his hand. A purple glow radiated from between his fingers. Leaning over him, Sam peered at it. A single crystal, smaller than a pea, emitted a weak amethyst pulse, illuminating the dirt-encrusted creases of the man’s palm. Sam reached for it, and the man snapped his fingers closed, hugging his fist to his chest.

“No!
See
the light. See it,” the man said.

“How can I see the light if you won’t show it to me?” Sam asked.

The man curled himself into a ball around his fist and rolled to his side on the sidewalk.

Ping walked up to the scene and said, “Is this man in need of medical assistance?”

“No, I think he’s just got a bad case of whatever is running around in this realm,” Mara said. “He’s got something in his hand that he was showing me, but Sam freaked him out.”

On the ground, the man hid his face in his own hands and mumbled, “See the light. See the light.”

Ping gave them a quizzical look and said, “What do you propose we do?”

“I don’t want to get distracted by every stranger we meet. I mean, everything will probably look strange to us. I want to find Cam’s head and get it to the repository as soon as possible,” Mara said.

“See the light,” the man hissed. He pulled his hands away from his face. His eyes shimmered like a cat’s, radiating enough to cast light onto his soiled cheeks.

Mara gasped. The man jumped up, pushed past Sam and dashed down the street.

“That looked kind of creepy,” Sam said, staring after the man until he disappeared around the corner a half block away.

“Perhaps that’s not an unusual characteristic of their eyes at nighttime,” Ping suggested.

Mara shook her head and said, “Cam’s eyes never did that, and most of the time we had his head was at night and outside in light almost exactly like this. There’s definitely something odd going on with that guy.”

“You said something about not wanting to get distracted?” Sam asked.

Mara pointed up the street and said, “Right. The dots are pointing us in this direction.”

After they had walked for two blocks, Ping said, “Assuming such a thing exists in this realm, I believe we are east of the Portland State University campus.”

Mara looked down the street and saw the dots hovering over the sidewalk as far as she could see. “We’re definitely heading in that direction,” she said.

The floating dots that only Mara could see led them to a derelict brick building with a highly pitched roofline that struck her as oddly out of place among the nearby modern office buildings, but it filled her with a sense of déjà vu. Most of the landmarks they had passed were familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on this one. It had a gray stone foundation and a crumpled pile of cinder blocks that climbed to an arched doorway in its red and beige brick facade. Tall narrow windows flanked the doorway, but rotting wood obscured them. Mara pointed up the staircase remains and said, “I’m not sure what this place is, but the tracking signal from Cam’s head is coming from in there.”

“Interesting choice of location,” Ping said. “It does raise the question of whether our synthetic friends actually practice some kind of religion.”

“I’m sorry?” Mara asked.

Ping nodded toward the front of the building. “In our realm, this is the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel, a Catholic church that is in much better repair than this. I would surmise that this version of the church hasn’t been used in many years. There are no signs. Even the crosses have been removed from the building. I wonder if that is significant.”

“Right now its only significance is the location of Cam’s head. Once we get that back, we can ask him about his religious beliefs until we’re blue in the face,” she said. She motioned toward the rising chipped and broken cinder blocks and said, “Do you think these stairs are safe?”

Sam stomped a foot on the first riser and said, “I think it’s more solid than it looks.” He quickly ran up the steps, hopping sideways over a couple large cracks and turning after he arrived at the landing in front of the door. “Get a move on, you guys. I’m getting hungry, and I have a sneaking suspicion that, if the people in this realm do eat, it probably isn’t any good.”

By the time Mara and Ping had joined him on the landing, Sam was opening one of the doors leading into the church. Its hinges screamed in protest. After the door was ajar enough to see inside, he said, “It’s pitch dark in there. How will we find someone’s head?”

Mara indicated the book bag over his shoulder and said, “There’s a small flashlight in there. I brought it when I thought I might have to do some repairs on Cam’s body.”

Sam dropped her bag from his shoulder, fished around in it, pulled out the flashlight and handed it to Mara. She slid her thumb over the Power switch and was about to step through the door when Ping put a hand on her shoulder.

“Perhaps it would be prudent for me to go in and have a look around, while the two of you wait here. After all, the last time we saw Cam’s head, it was with the Aphotis, and we know she is lurking somewhere in this realm,” he said.

Mara looked over her shoulder and said, “You guys can stay here if you like, but I’m going in. If she’s here, I’ll have to deal with her one way or the other, no matter who goes in first. No point in using one of you as Aphotis fodder, is there?”

“I suppose not,” Ping said. He nodded for her to continue through the door, then waved for Sam to follow her. Ping took up the rear.

The soles of Mara’s shoes set off gritty echoes as she stepped through the doorway. It felt like she was walking on a sandy wood floor. She stepped forward gingerly because she could not make out any details ahead. The darkness swallowed the meager light of her flashlight, revealing little more than dust floating in the air. The beam did not reach any wall ahead and only provided the faintest of shadows to the side. Aiming the light downward, Mara saw gray wooden planks, cracked and curling at the edges, as if they had been exposed to the elements. She caught her toe on one of them.

“Be careful. The floor is not very flat in here,” she said.

They continued straight into the building for several paces, still not seeing anything of interest, but Mara sensed something ahead. She lifted the light. The beam fell on a woman’s face, frozen in mid-scream, fixed in a rictus of terror, lying sideways on a metal table, her eyes rolled into the back of her head. Mara gasped and reflexively yanked the light away from the face, revealing it was not connected to a body. As revulsion ran through Mara, it took a moment to remember that another bodiless head is what brought them to this point.

Ping sidled up to her and asked, “What was that up ahead?”

Mara pointed the light at the tabletop.

“Oh my,” Ping said.

“Why can’t these people keep up with their heads?” Sam whispered.

“Shush,” Mara said. She ran the light down the table and added, “There’s no body.”

Ping pointed beyond the table. “Cast the light farther.”

She swept the light ahead, revealing a row of tables behind the one in front of them. Each held an occupant, each suffering from various degrees of dismemberment. Arcing the light to the left, Mara found another row of tables, aligned horizontally. She stopped on the table to the left of the one in front of them. Random body parts—several legs, a couple arms, a torso and two heads—were arrayed across it in no particular order. From a distance they looked like toys torn apart and discarded by a bored child, but, when Mara approached, the expressions on the faces told a different story.

“It looks like these people were awake while they were taken apart, like some kind of torture,” she said.

Ping walked to the table of body parts and slid to the side one of the legs that lay on top of a man’s head. Using two fingers, Ping rolled the head sideways, so that its face looked into the light Mara held. Shock and pain filled the light. Ping turned the face away and revealed a large hole in the back of its head.

“Do you think someone shot him or struck him?” Sam asked.

Ping shook his head. “No, the skin and hair are pulled away from the edges, like someone ripped or gouged open his head.”

Using the flashlight as a prod, Mara nudged several limbs off the other head, sending two arms clattering to the floor. Jumping at the noise, she took a deep breath and reoriented the light toward the second head, this one a young blonde woman with long hair hiding her face. Mara nodded toward the table and asked, “Can you take a look at her and see if she’s the same?”

Ping stepped into the light and gently pushed aside the blond hair, revealing another visage of pain and fright. Leaning over the table, he grasped the head and lifted it. He stepped from the beam of light and leaned sideways, holding the head to his side, so they could inspect it. The back of the head was torn open identically to the other one. Ping tried to peer into the hole.

“Not being familiar with their physiology, I cannot hazard a guess as to what may have been inserted or extracted,” Ping said.

“What makes you think anything was?” Mara asked.

“If these people were disassembled while conscious, presumably whoever did it wouldn’t drill or tear a hole in their heads to subdue them. The logical conclusion would be the perpetrator needed to put something in or take something out of their heads,” he said. “What I can’t seem to fathom is why disassemble them in such a haphazard fashion?”

“The only reason to take something apart like this would be to figure out how it works,” Mara said. “But we’re talking about human beings here, not toasters.”

“That might not be much of a distinction to the Aphotis, assuming she’s the one who did this.”

“Who else would need to learn how these people work? The big question is, why does she need to know how they work? What’s she hoping to accomplish?” Mara asked.

“Maybe if the two of you could stay on task for five minutes, we could find out,” Sam said.

Mara turned the light on him, revealing an exasperated expression. “Do you have a point you would like to make?” Mara asked.

“Maybe Cam saw something before his head went inactive. Why don’t we find that and see if he can give us some idea about what happened here? That
is
why we came in here, isn’t it?” Sam said.

“You’re right. We should find his head. But I doubt he’ll be able to tell us anything. I got the impression we’d need to return him to the repository before the head would function again,” she said.

“Unless you fix it before we get back. Didn’t you say he became conscious when you handled his faceplate?” Sam asked.

“Yes, that’s true.” Mara’s voice faded out as she once again became aware of the floating dots that had led them into the church. She pointed ahead and to the right, into the darkness. “His signal is coming from over there, toward the back corner of the building.”

She stepped around the corner of the table and kicked something that skittered across the floor into the legs of the neighboring table. After pausing for a moment, she took another step and struck something else. Whatever it was rolled along the floor, and Mara could have sworn she felt fingers grasping at her calves. A shiver ran up her spine, and she raised a hand, signaling for Ping and Sam to stop.

“We’ll need more light to get through here, I think,” she said. “I know it’s all in my head, but I don’t like the notion of walking in the dark, wading through body parts,” she said.

“What do you suggest?” Ping asked.

Mara pointed the light at the book bag slung over Sam’s shoulder. “Hand that to me and take the light,” she said to him.

After giving her the bag, Sam held the light on it while Mara rummaged around in it. She pulled out the green demontoid crystal, thought for a moment, then put it back and felt around in the bag some more, sending muffled clanking noises to the rafters.

“Maybe we should be quieter with the Aphotis afoot,” Sam said.

“
Afoot
? What are we working on here? A case with Sherlock Holmes or something?” Mara said, then added, “Oh! I did put it in here.”

She pulled out a yellow crystal, the bytownite they had kept at Ping’s warehouse. Shoving the book bag at Sam, she said, “Take this.”

“I guess we know who’s playing the role of Watson in this little mystery,” he said, as he slung the bag over his shoulder. He pointed the light into Mara’s eyes. “You want me to keep the light?”

Mara held the crystal on her right palm and said, “Keep the light on the crystal, at least for the time being.”

She closed her eyes and lifted the crystal slightly. It rolled on her palm, then stood up on a faceted point and spun in the center of her open hand. Gaining speed, it rotated faster and slowly floated into the air above their heads. Sam tracked its progress as it hovered above them. When it reached some twenty feet high, the crystal caught a beam of light that exploded in a brilliant starburst, filling the vaulted rafters with light.

“Wow! Eat your heart out, Thomas Edison,” Sam said.

When their eyes lowered from the floating, glowing crystal, they could see hundreds of body parts surrounded them, laying on a dozen tables and covering almost all the worn wood floor of the dilapidated church.

Mannequins
. It was the first thought that came to Mara as she surveyed the bloodless carnage strewn throughout the church. Somehow it gave her emotional distance from the violence that had occurred here—until her gaze stopped at a pile of limbs stacked off to the right of the tables. At the top, an arm reached into the air, as if grasping for a handhold, a way for the buried victim to pull himself from the nightmare. Glancing down to make sure she didn’t trip on random body parts, she approached the mountain of appendages stacked several inches higher than she stood.