The Chamber in the Sky (6 page)

T
he children rode the currents of the blood.

At first, their plan was to wait for the fire to burn out, then return to the magnetic dock.

They waited a long time. They knew that Dr. Brundish would be waiting, too. Brian pictured the ghastly man standing in his grubby robes and top hat, pistol drawn.

An hour passed, or two. They argued about whether they should go back or not.

Gregory and Gwynyfer won the argument, and they all sat tight. Gregory had put himself in charge of the control levers.

Brian sat with his knees up against his chest.

A fan clunked as it circulated the air, trying to filter out the smoke. The kids kept coughing. They'd shut the engine off to conserve gas.

When more time had passed, Gregory and Gwynyfer agreed to go back to the hermit's hut.

But by that time, they discovered they'd drifted. They turned on the electric lights fastened to the hull of the
little sub and discovered they were passing through a forest of bloodweed, pushed along by some mysterious tide. They had no idea how far they were from the Dry Heart, let alone the airlock at the boathouse.

Gregory swore. He kept swearing for some time.

Gwynyfer clearly didn't like it. She turned away and stared out another window.

“We've got to go back,” Brian said.

“Where's
back
?” Gwynyfer said. “We don't know how to navigate in the flux.”

“Against the current,” said Brian.

Gregory turned on the motor. The sub chugged along for a while, but the current seemed to have slackened. They couldn't tell which direction they were headed in. They got angry at one another.

Brian pictured the ex-archbishop lying on his kitchen floor, bleeding.

The submarine dinghy chugged through some unnamed vein, moving in some direction, and they hoped they'd run into something that would let them disembark before their air ran out.

After a while, they turned off the motor, turned out the lights, and went to sleep.

When they woke up, they didn't know how long they'd slept. Nothing much was different outside the windows. A school of something yellow scissored past.

“There's the wall of the artery,” said Brian.

“Vein,” Gregory corrected.

Brian clammed up. Gregory didn't know whether it was a vein or artery any better than he did. Gregory just wanted
to correct him. In fact, Brian suspected that Gregory didn't even know the difference between a vein and an artery.

Just when Brian was about to say that out loud, he realized that he also couldn't remember the difference between a vein and an artery. He knew one took blood away from the heart, and the other took blood toward the heart, but he couldn't remember which did which. And he didn't know which direction this particular blood vessel led — toward or away from which heart?

“Do you think we'll die in this dinghy?” Gwynyfer asked, as if she were about to take bets. “I'd be awfully glad of a deviled egg right about nowish.”

The two boys didn't answer.

The dinghy puttered on toward nothing. They followed the curve of the wall, seeking other airlocks, other docks, other subs.

Brian was starting to panic. The space was too enclosed. There were only a few cubic feet of cushion, hull, and rivets. The air was getting too hot. The seats smelled of salt and iron. He could tell that there was gasoline in the air. The fan blew raggedly and unevenly. Brian swallowed and coughed.

Suddenly, he wanted to unscrew the door.

Yes, he knew they'd be flooded. But just to be able to move freely … to move his arms easily again, even for a few seconds …

He knew it was just panic. He knew he had to control himself. But he didn't know how he was going to.

“Do you think there are other Great Bodies?” Gregory asked. “I mean, outside of this one?”

Brian felt like he was about to scream.

Gwynyfer shrugged. “I don't know. I'm not a theologian. There are people who say that if we could just get outside the Great Body, we'd find ourselves in a herd of them, all these massive thingies progressing toward some burning light. And that there would be whole other civilizations inside the other bodies, and we could travel and meet them, which would be jolly.” She played with her hair, twisting it around her fingers. “But I don't —”

“I JUST CAN'T TAKE IT!”
Brian shouted suddenly.
“I CAN'T! I CAN'T! I CAN'T!”

He started pounding on the hull. The whole thing wobbled with his blows. He scrabbled around on the cushions. Gregory reached out to grab him.

“Brian! Bri! Bri!”

Brian was having trouble breathing. Felt like he was choking. No air. His breath came hard. He gagged. Grabbing at his throat. Nothing left in his chest.

Gregory was saying something to him — he had to get out — he had to —

Gregory put his hand over Brian's eyes. “Stop it, Brian!” he said firmly. “Stop it. Picture us on a … a wide plain. With lots of grass.”

“We're not! I can't breathe!”

“
Picture
yourself. As much space as you need. Sure, it's a little hot. That's cause we're in Iowa in the middle of the summer. Big sky. Big, big sky, Bri.”

“There's a gas station by the side of the road,” Gwynyfer sang out seductively, and not entirely kindly, “where you can get a double-pack of snack chips …”

Gregory insisted, “Picture the big sky. Picture the field.”

“Picture the snack chips. Picture the mini-donut gems. Picture the beef jerky.”

“All right,” said Brian, not entirely gratefully.

They could hear his breathing slow down. They all just sat there. No one moved.

The dinghy dropped deeper and deeper into unknown territory.

And then Gwynyfer called out softly, “As it happens, chappies, we're saved.” Her voice was drunk with excitement. “Looky, looky. An extraction station.”

They looked out the portholes and saw some vast factory floating in the ooze, a huge assemblage of metal cylinders turning slowly in the currents. Each arm of the thing was capped with a sieve or a funnel. The arms swung past them — or they puttered between them. Huge black shapes wheeled in the green darkness.

“They're run by mannequins, usually,” said Gwynyfer. “They get various minerals and things out of the blood. Then they sell them to us. They'll let us dock there. They'll tell us how to get back to the Dry Heart — or down to Two-Gut where the Umpire is. And most important, they'll arrange a lavatory.” She beat for joy on the port-hole glass.

Then a light flashed on them. It shot through the portholes. Gwynyfer waved. She blew a kiss. The spotlight moved on past, cutting through the gloom. It disappeared.

“Hey!” said Gregory, as if someone out in the bloodstream could hear him. “Where do we go to land?” He
steered his way around the facility, looking for someplace they could dock. The whole metal surface of the extraction station was slick with algae, or something like it.

They found a row of hatches of different sizes. There was a small lamp lighting them.

“There are no other subs here,” said Gregory. “Shouldn't there be other people? Where's the spotlight that caught us a minute ago?”

No one knew.

With a magnetic clank, the dinghy attached to the skin of the factory and hung there.

The doors were right up against one another. The dinghy slid on grooves until it was locked in place. Gregory shut off the engine.

“Am I amazing at steering or what?” said Gregory. “I could be the star of a submarine cop show.”

Gwynyfer and Brian were already stooping by the dinghy's hatch. Gwynyfer said, “Bri-Bri wants space to scream in, and I have to find a little room where an up-and-coming duchess can do the necessary.”

They fumbled excitedly with cranks. They figured out how to work a small hand-pump that forced out the watery flux from between the two hulls.

They threw open the dinghy's hatch. With some difficulty, they reached around it and swung wide the hatch into the factory.

They stumbled out into a docking bay, ready for welcome.

But something was very, very wrong.

T
he docking bay was lit with a dim, bare bulb. The iron walls were scarred and discolored. Someone had spray-painted a Norumbegan rune again and again on all the doors. The rune read:
Closed.

“No,” said Gwynyfer. “A girl doesn't take closed for an answer. My bladder is going to burst like a Christmas cracker.”

Gregory asked playfully, “Do future duchesses talk about their bladders?”

Gwynyfer went over and tugged the door handles. “If they don't, they explode into shreds, and then they never get to be duchesses at all.”

The kids were unhappy to find two of the doors locked.

But they were even more unhappy, somehow, when the third door was ajar.

It seemed like the place might have been abandoned in a hurry.

The hallway beyond was dark. A faint, clammy breeze blew out of the shadows. Gwynyfer flicked a toggle switch.

There was a long, brown metal corridor. It was lit by one single bulb, halfway down. The other bulbs had been removed.

They no longer joked or talked. They carefully stepped through the portal and made their way down the hallway. Their footfalls made the metal ring dully. It was the only sound they heard.

“Should we keep going?” asked Brian in a voice that suggested he did not think that they should.

The huge edifice was silent, save for the occasional creak.

They walked down hallways and through abandoned offices.

“You know what I just thought of?” whispered Brian. “This place was run by mannequins. I bet they left it behind when they all banded together to attack New Norumbega.”

“You know what
I
just thought of?” whispered Gwynyfer. “Mannequins don't have toilets.”

And with that, she disappeared.

Gregory gasped and turned.

She was gone.

She'd swerved into a side room. Or had been pulled.

They were worried until they heard her voice. She continued, echoing, “So any little place will do.”

She slammed the door shut.

They waited for her to come out.

They stared at each other, leaning against opposite
walls of the metal corridor. They could faintly feel the station turning in the murk.

The sounds from within the side room were very faint. They could hear Gwynyfer walk a few steps.

Then everything fell silent.

Gregory crossed his legs. He and Brian looked nervously up and down the corridor.

Brian was suddenly worried about Gwynyfer. He watched the door. He wondered how long it took girls to pee.

And then, far away, there were footsteps.

They were lonely, slow footsteps, heard through stairwells and control rooms and cold furnaces. Walking slowly, deliberately, toward the kids. The kind of footsteps that might be made by a corpse forced to wander through an endless underworld of empty metal rooms.

Gregory and Brian looked wildly at each other.

“Of course there's someone,” hissed Brian. “We knew that. Whoever shined the spotlight on us.”

“I don't like this,” said Gregory.

Brian shook his head. “I don't, either.”

The footsteps had picked up their pace. Now they were jogging down circular metal stairs.

Gregory tapped on the door. “Gwynyfer! Someone's coming!”

She knew enough not to make a joke. She opened the door and peered out. “Oh no,” she said.

“Back to the dinghy,” said Brian. His face was white.

They quickly — but quietly — padded back the way they had come.

But the clamor was getting closer. They weren't going to make it.

No way they could get back to the sub.

The metal floors around them rang with thuds.

They hid under desks. The three of them were lined up, crouching with chairs pulled in close to their faces.

They did not lift their heads to look when the footfalls slowed. Someone was in the room with them. Someone's breath was fast and thrilled.

They heard the slight clack of metal. Iron things scraping across other iron things.

Out of the dark stepped a man — a Thusser man — with high, pointed ears and the black-rimmed eyes of the Thusser. The orbs of the eyes themselves were wet and dark, all pupil, no white. His face was as round as a baby's. He wore a long Thusser coat but also a harness with many straps, and off those straps hung knives and sickles and jagged tools for cutting and torture. They jingled gently as he walked.

He could not stop licking his lips. His tongue came out of his mouth and squirmed, and went back in and once again lolloped out. His head jerked as he sought his prey.

Crunched up beneath a desk, behind a chair, clutching his own knees, Brian realized: Before they'd left New Norumbega, the kids had heard that the Thusser were trying to seize on subs so they could assault the Dry Heart. This base might not have been abandoned by the mannequins when the mechanical servants went up to the capital to conduct their rebellion. It might have been abandoned when the mannequins realized that the
Thusser were coming, that the Horde was searching out all the arteries and veins for submarines of all shapes and sizes to carry their armies.

This lone Thusser, Brian realized, had probably been left to guard this site and trap anyone who landed here.

Brian hid his face. He felt like if he didn't see the Thusser, there was somehow less chance the Thusser would see him.

He saw that Gregory, next to him, was actually shaking with fear.

Two knives rasped together. The Thusser walked slowly through the room. Brian could hear thick breathing as the man licked his own lips.

Brian lifted his head a little. He regretted it: His shirt rustled.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The legs were right near him. Under the long Thusser coat, the man wore blue polyester tracksuit bottoms. They were too long for him, and their dragging cuffs were wet, smeared black, and torn where he walked on them. His feet were bare, coated in cracked mud like alligator skin.

The Thusser stood near Brian and sighed — a weird, high sound like a little girl who wanted friends.

He shuffled his feet.

And then he dove and yanked the chairs out.