Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard (16 page)

“Yes? Oh, yes, I see what you mean,” Ruggiero grunted,
suddenly sounding upset about something....

Paul’s eyebrows twitched. And just what did that exchange
mean? Had they noticed...? Oh, no!

Frantically, Paul muttered a couple of words and waved the
portal closed, and then he turned for the bed, reaching out to magically turn
off the room light....

But he was too late.

His muscles froze in mid-motion, and he collapsed to the
floor, paralyzed by a magical spell. Though he could not move, he could still
see, and out of the corner of one eye, he saw Ruggiero standing in front of a
portal, just inside the bedroom door, with what appeared to be the library
visible through the portal behind him.

“How long do you think he was listening to us?” a frowning Celeste
asked, coming through the portal behind Ruggiero.

“I don’t even know how he was doing it,” admitted Ruggiero
grudgingly, scowling at the sprawled form on the floor. “And quite frankly,
that disturbs me. I could have sworn that there were no magical spells in use
in the library, other than our own, of course. So that part is a mystery. If
you hadn’t checked in on him and seen him listening to our conversation, we
might never have known what he was up to. But to answer your question, he
probably heard more than enough. There is no point in trying to be nice to him anymore.
I have a different idea for our Mr. Armstead now.”

Ruggiero waved a hand, reducing Paul to an unconscious
state.

Unknown location

Somewhere in France

December

Friday (Christmas Day), time unknown

P
ain.
Then again, another sharp pain. Somebody was slapping his face. And again. Not
real hard. But hard enough.

Paul opened his eyes, but there were multiple spinning
images of everything around him.

“Ah, we are making progress,” a voice said in dry humor.

The words had no meaning to Paul. He felt completely
disoriented, like he was waking from a nap without knowing where he was. Only
this was worse. He couldn’t form a cogent thought at all.

“Pass me that glass,” ordered the voice. “Here, drink this,
it will help.”

A hand slipped behind Paul’s head, raising him up. There was
pressure on his lips and a sense of wetness. Without conscious control, he swallowed.

“Good. Drink more.”

The liquid warmed him up internally, making its way from his
stomach up to his head and out to his arms and legs. A sense of strength flowed
into him, and then suddenly, his mind began to clear.

“You see, it works every time,” muttered the voice. This
time, the words made sense, in a distant fashion.

Paul snapped upright and looked around, his eyes blinking as
he tried to take in his surroundings. And they weren’t good. What he saw
intimidated and appalled him.

Standing next to him, floating a few inches off the ground, were
Dr. Ruggiero and Celeste. Both of them were staring at him as if he were some
form of interesting insect.

The room was totally unfamiliar to Paul. Large, with stone
walls and a dirt floor with scattered stacks of wooden crates. High overhead was
a roof with rafters, but no ceiling. From the background sounds and the chill
in the air, Paul sensed that he was in an outdoors facility of some sort, like
a barn or livestock building, but without animals.

Beneath him was some sort of gurney.

But it was the two Oni stationed nearby, watching him
closely, that captivated Paul’s undivided attention. And with the hair lifting
on the nape of his neck, he noticed that the Oni weren’t smiling at all, just
staring at him with those big black eyes.

Paul had goosebumps on top of goosebumps.

Celeste noticed Paul’s wide-eyed look at the Oni. “As long
as you behave yourself, they won’t hurt you. Understand?”

Paul nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off the monsters.

Ruggiero tossed the glass into the air, where it disappeared
in a small flash of light, and then he floated a few feet farther away. Celeste
followed.

“Bring him,” the doctor commanded.

The Oni grabbed Paul by his right arm and the stump of his
left, dragged him in front of the two wizards, and forced him to his knees. One
small corner of his mind noted that he was no longer wearing the red pajamas
but was instead wearing his original clothes, the ones from California. But he
ignored the thought, concentrating instead on the direness of his current
situation.

“Now, Mr. Armstead, I am not willing to waste time here
trying to drag information out of you yet. I hit you too hard and you haven’t
fully recovered your senses. Also, the way I see it, you need a little bit of time
by yourself to do some meditation. Later, we will talk. And when we talk, if
you cooperate, we will get along fine. If not, I’ll let the Oni deal with you.
And they will do a lot more than just remove part of one arm. So, you think
about that for a while.”

He nodded to the Oni, and they yanked Paul to his feet,
dragging him away.

• • • •

They quite literally tossed Paul through the air, into a
small room with a hard wooden floor, slamming the door behind them as they
left. For a while, he lay still, trying to get his breath back while also fighting
to remember what had happened. One minute, he had been in the house in Paris,
and the next, he was in this place.

The memory of the library conversation came flooding back
into his mind.

Oh, yeah, he had been well and truly busted.

The lighting in this room was poor, but sufficient for him
to make out a few details. Perhaps six feet by six feet, the available space felt
very restrictive. Almost claustrophobic.

Climbing slowly to his feet, Paul carefully examined the
room. It didn’t take long. There was no furniture, no fixtures at all, and not
a single window. The sole object in the small room was a bucket in one corner.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were all wooden planks nailed tightly together.
The door was locked and didn’t budge even one iota. A soft glow was coming from
somewhere in the room.

Patting his pockets revealed that all his personal items
were gone. No wallet, no car keys, no change, no watch, and worst of all, no
talisman. And his glasses were gone as well. He groaned in anguish, sliding
down one wall into a sitting position on the floor. What a way to spend
Christmas Day! He would gladly trade this situation for the chance to go back
to his day job. In a blue funk, he thought of all the movies, TV episodes and
books where the hero or heroes had been thrown into a jail cell. And there a
lot of such stories, many of them involving nasty, vile dungeons, cruel
sadistic guards, foul food and back breaking prison labor. And yet the heroes
of such tales had universally faced their dire plights with courage,
confidence, a degree of humor and a steadfast determination to escape at all
costs.

Paul felt none of those heroic tendencies here.

I am not a hero
! he silently screamed at the ceiling
of his prison.
I can’t do what they did! My situation is hopeless
!

Crawling into a corner of his cramped quarters, he huddled
there on the floor with his knees up against his chest. Despair gripped him in
a thousand icy fingers. In short order, he felt lightheaded, he was sweating
profusely, his heart was beating rapidly, he was short of breath and his chest
hurt as if his heart was being squeezed in a vise. A feeling of intense doom
descended upon him.

“What’s going to happen to me now?” he whispered in a tiny
voice.

• • • •

He awoke a few hours later, feeling somewhat refreshed and
more alert but also feeling stiff, sore, hungry, and thirsty—and still
depressed. Again, he cast a small spell on himself to block his discomfort.
Unfortunately, there seemed to be no spell to cure his emotional state of mind.

It was still Christmas Day. Gee, what a cheerful thought
that was! A prisoner of wicked wizards on Christmas! Such fun!

He gritted his teeth. There were questions to be answered. He
needed some of that super-genius assistance again. But not Merlin this time.

“In the name of Basil Rathbone, Robert Downey, Jr., and Lt.
Commander Data, let a virtual reality image of Sherlock Holmes appear.”

A hologram of a man of medium height materialized wearing an
old-fashioned dark suit of Victorian cut and a deerstalker hat. His hair and
sideburns were an unruly brown and framed a thin, but serious face with small
black piercing eyes and thin, colorless lips.

The hologram doffed the hat, tossing it into a corner. Then
he turned to study the walls. Reaching out, he ran a finger along a wood seam.

“
Pinus Pinaster
, commonly known as the maritime pine
or cluster pine. Primarily found growing in Portugal, Spain, southern and
western France, western Italy, and northern Morocco. Not a common lumber. Has a
low magical quotient, I expect.”

Holmes flashed Paul a quick, thin smile. “Let me guess your
questions. One, where are you? Two, how did you come to be here? Three, what do
your captors want? And four, how do you escape? Shall we start with those?”

Surprised by Holmes’s quick intelligence and evaluation of
his situation, the corners of Paul’s mouth quirked up hopefully. “Yes, please.”

Holmes waved a hand at the walls. “Certainly, you are in the
western Mediterranean area, probably still in France and most likely somewhere
along the southern French Atlantic coastline, say between Saint-Jean-de-Luz and
Bordeaux. Obviously, Celeste and Ruggiero put you here when they discovered you
had eavesdropped on their conversation. So now they are quite convinced you are
a spy and now plan to kill you, just as soon as they finish interrogating you. Naturally,
they want to know what information you are trying to obtain, who sent you, and
what plans your spymaster has for them. Of course, you can’t tell them, because
they have drawn the wrong conclusion about your presence here. However, you won’t
be able to convince them of that. The fact that you will insist on a story they
find unacceptable and that you will continue to refuse to answer their
questions will madden them. I anticipate that the torture sessions will not be
pleasant, and following those, the Oni will make your death an extremely
painful one.”

Crestfallen, Paul closed his eyes and bowed his head. Yeah,
Holmes was right. He had screwed up. Again.

“Now, how do you escape?” Sherlock continued, seemingly
oblivious to Paul’s emotional state of mind. “An interesting question. But
there is something else we need to cover that’s even more important. Let’s
consider the evidence. Ruggiero was quite puzzled about how you managed to
listen in on their conversation without a direct spell. Now, why is that?”

Holmes turned to Paul and waited expectantly while Paul blinked
in surprise.

“How should I know that?” Paul asked frankly, not
understanding the sudden change in the conversation.

The detective clenched his jaw, looking annoyed. “Come on,
man, think! Let me give you a clue. Celeste asked if you might be something
special, remember?”

Paul shrugged, still puzzled. “Yes. So what? They both
agreed that I am not. Just another ordinary run-of-the-mill rookie wizard. So what
are you talking about?”

Sitting on an imaginary chair that had popped up out of
nowhere, Holmes leaned forward earnestly. “But you might be special. You could
be, especially if it saves your life.”

Shaking his head, Paul protested, “You are not making sense.
Slow down and explain!”

“As you wish,” Holmes replied, grinning. “Remember what
Ruggiero asked Celeste? If you had some sort of special or superpowers?”

Paul thought back over the library conversation. “Yes. I
didn’t give it much thought at the time. Again, what are you driving at?”

Holmes smiled again. “Your claim of unusual powers.”

Paul frowned, his brow furrowed, surprised by the detective’s
statement. “I didn’t claim any unusual powers!”

“The ability to pass one material object through another on
a molecular level,” Holmes pointed out. “The ability to survive in space.
Remember, those were the reasons Ruggiero didn’t believe you and thought you a
spy.”

Paul considered the hologram’s analysis. It seemed so
outlandish, so preposterous an idea.

“It’s another reason that he is keeping you alive,” Holmes
argued intensely. “And he has put you here, in this tiny room, without your
talisman, in order to soften you up before he interrogates you. It’s a common
enough tactic, a sort of sensory deprivation, to make you more cooperative.”

That last part Paul could understand.

“Then he will likely leave me in here for a few days,” he guessed,
knowing that it was what he might have done, if the situation were reversed and
if he were mean-spirited enough.

“At the very least.” Holmes gave him a nod in agreement.

Paul slowly shook his head in discouragement. “And when he
finally gets around to questioning me, he’ll discover that I can’t answer his
questions, because I am not a spy. Then, eeeeccch!” he said, drawing a line
across his neck with one finger.

“I would not be so quick to leap to that conclusion,” Holmes
contested. “We know that you are not a spy, but on the other hand, perhaps you
are not an ordinary wizard either, as you say.
It behooves you to investigate
the possibility that you are not. And to be quite frank with you, I really
think you just may possess powers that are superior to theirs.”

Paul ogled at him. “What makes you think that?”

“Think, man,
think
! The library that Ruggiero and
Celeste were so proud of, that you found so blasé. Did you see anything modern
in it? Any periodicals, anything published after the year 1900?”

“Ah, no, not really,” Paul admitted, mystified by where
Holmes was going with all of this.

Holmes persisted. “And nothing on science, engineering, or
mathematics. Did you see anything electronic in their house? Computers, cell
phones, LED TVs? Even a
telephone
or a
wall clock
? Any modern
devices at
all
?”

“No. I just thought, well, maybe wizards don’t need any of
that stuff,” Paul replied, sulking. Holmes’s logic was still baffling him.

“Maybe it’s more basic than that,” Holmes pointed out,
leaning close to Paul again. “Tell me. How old are all the wizards on Earth?”

“At least 400 years old. In most cases, older than that,”
Paul answered, puzzled that Holmes would ask him that question. He was supposed
to answer Paul’s questions, not the other way around.

“Correct,” Holmes responded with a tight smile. “All of them
were born long before the modern age, long before the first steam engines, let
alone jet aircraft, space travel, quantum physics, or science fiction. Did you
not see the way Ruggiero and Celeste froze when you mentioned a science-fiction
movie? Like you had just blasphemed in their presence.”

Paul blinked in surprise. Holmes was finally getting through
to him.

“Yes, I noticed,” Paul admitted thoughtfully, reaching up to
push his nonexistent glasses up on his nose and scowling in impatience when he
remembered that they weren’t there to
be
pushed up anymore. “But it didn’t
make sense to me at the time. You’re saying that they don’t understand the
modern age?”