Waking Storms (16 page)

People wouldn’t find it amusing for much longer. That much seemed certain.

***

Ten minutes later Ellison was playing a video file on a giant monitor while half a dozen men in business clothes and a single woman with frosted gray-blond hair and a neat burgundy suit all stared into the screen. The image was green and murky: the waters of the Bering Sea tended to be somewhat cloudy from all the plankton. Light fell from behind, casting the figure as a dim silhouette. It was impossible to make out the color of the girl’s long scrolling hair or the features of her face. But the important part was clear enough: this was a girl’s head and torso, shifting at the hips into a sinuous, whiplashing tail with broad, sensitively curling fins. She appeared for only an instant, and Ellison tapped a few keys on his laptop. Now the video played again and again, slowed down to a twentieth of its original speed. The whiplash of the tail became a dreamlike snaking, and the girl turned her head to the surface before vanishing upward. Then she was back in the bottom corner of the frame: her tail snaked again, her head turned again, and again she flicked away ... Ellison had watched this tape a thousand times, but once again he was mesmerized by the strange beauty of the image, the heartbreaking grace of the mermaid’s movements.

It was appalling to think that Dorian Hurst was—there was no other word for it
—dating
one of these creatures. But Ellison had to admit to himself that the mermaid on the screen was completely irresistible. If he were in Dorian’s place...

“Be simple enough to fake something like this,” the Secretary of Defense snarled. It made his jowls quiver. His stiff white hair looked like cake frosting, and there was an unpleasant dullness, an obvious absence of feeling, in the hard glint of his eyes.

“We’ve already checked for signs of digital manipulation, Mr. Secretary,” a young, fidgety man with a sky blue tie objected. “It appears to be legitimate.”

“You don’t need digital manipulation to pay some girl to tie on a fake tail and go swimming. They have these girls in Florida, as a tourist attraction. Babes in tanks.” The Secretary of Defense sounded somewhere between snide and impatient. “This all you got, Agent Ellison?”

Ellison tapped again, zeroing in on the section of the footage that showed the tail, blowing it up so that it filled the whole screen. “With all due respect, Secretary Moreland,” Ellison said, trying to stay calm, “a girl wearing a mermaid costume still has
knees.”

“And your point is?” Secretary Moreland droned. The woman in the burgundy suit was quicker on the uptake, though. She let out a sudden cry and jumped from her chair, eyes round with shock, pointing at the screen.

“He’s right!” Now the complex, hundred-jointed, threedimensional flux of that tail was apparent to everyone. Shock spread through the room in a palpable wave. “Secretary Moreland ... it would be anatomically impossible for a human being to move that way. And the fins...” She pointed again, and Ellison tapped, magnifying the image even more. The fins rippled on the screen, as sensuous and agile as the fingers of a concert pianist. The woman turned to the young man with the sky blue tie, a look of desperate appeal on her face. “Are you
sure
this wasn’t created by a computer?”

“I’m
reasonably
sure—” the young man started, but Secretary Moreland waved him to silence.

“Think what we’re dealing with, people. Agent Ellison here gets hold of
one
photo that just looks like a bunch of seaweed to me, and he goes off on this rampage. Says he has audio files, but he’s been shouting all over the place that these recordings are
somehow,
for some big fat mystery of a reason, too dangerous for anyone to hear. That’s the best reason he can give for hiding his alleged evidence. And then he talks the Director into sending out teams to install video cameras, and they all come up blank for weeks. All of them except one, which just
happens
to get smashed a few minutes after they turn it on. Now this.” Moreland cocked his head at the screen. “
Reasonably sure
doesn’t cut it. Not when this video is coming from a known fanatic. No offense meant, of course, Agent Ellison.”

The men in the room were glancing around at one another, obviously doing their best to be persuaded. The woman in burgundy still gaped helplessly into the screen as if she hadn’t heard Moreland speaking, and for some reason the boy with the blue tie was staring at the woman, a look of inexplicable compassion on his face. An excruciating sense of futility choked Ben Ellison as he sat with his hands stiffly folded on the conference table. There would never be any stronger evidence than this; they would never manage to capture one of these creatures alive. He felt sure of that. These idiots were stubbornly determined to avoid a truth too big to fit in their tiny minds, and every day, somewhere in the world, another ship was lured to its destruction. It was all he could do not to explode with rage.

“Of course,” Secretary Moreland went on, “if these audio recordings were actually produced,
maybe
we’d get somewhere.”

Ellison looked up. “We’ve done an analysis of the sound waves, Secretary Moreland. I sent you the report.”

“Bunch of squiggly lines. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Those
squiggly lines
massacred the entire crew of the
Integrity,
Mr. Secretary. When we recovered the black box, we found it had captured a full eight minutes of these sounds. The crew members never speak...” Ellison’s frustration had started sharpening his voice, and he struggled to control it.

“But Agent Ellison...” A gray man in a beige suit was speaking, a very important gray man, Ellison knew. “I think Secretary Moreland’s point is well taken. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, after all. You tell us that the
Integrity’s
black box recorded some unidentified music. But for all we know this music could be something the captain was playing on the stereo.” Agent Ellison almost gagged. “This claim you make, that this sound file is so dangerous ... What basis do you have for that belief? Has
anyone
listened to it?”

“I have.” Ellison knew that admitting this would only lead to more problems, but...“Immediately after we found the black box. I played exactly one second of the file.”

“And?” the gray man pursued.

“And what I experienced convinced me that this recording poses a severe hazard to anyone who hears it.” Ben Ellison tried to keep his expression steady. He couldn’t tell these people how that momentary burst of music had affected him, not when they already suspected he was at least half insane.

Secretary Moreland got up from his chair and started pacing, brushing past the woman in burgundy, who remained fixated on the screen, her eyes consumed by the dark, rippling form. “Agent Ellison...” The Secretary’s tone was scolding; he even waved a finger. “Still not good enough.”

“Mr. Secretary—”

“Still just your personal claims of this, that, and the other. Do you have this little ditty on your laptop now?”

Ellison felt a rush of nausea at hearing mermaid song described this way. “I do.”

“Play it for me. I’d like to hear it.” Secretary Moreland smiled and spread his hands in invitation.

“Mr. Secretary, I can’t take any responsibility—

“I’ve served in two wars, Agent Ellison. I’ve had my best friend’s blood spray across my face, and I picked his severed head up off the dirt with my bare hands.” Moreland was still smiling broadly as he said this. “I think I can handle it.”

Ellison looked around the room, and the gathered faces gazed back at him. It was horrible to think of what might happen to these people. “Please listen through earphones, then, Secretary Moreland.”

“Oh, certainly.” Moreland’s smile turned predatory.

“Will a one-second excerpt be sufficient?”

“Try thirty. Thirty seconds, and then I’ll tell you what kind of career you can expect after today. I don’t think even the FBI tolerates this kind of time-wasting.”

Ellison clicked on a different program, opened the file, and set the in and out points. He plugged in the earbuds and passed them to Moreland, who sat down again and shoved them aggressively into his ears, still smiling horribly. There was no telling what this music would do to the country’s Secretary of Defense, but it didn’t seem likely that the man would emerge with his mind intact. As far as Ellison was concerned, the most remarkable thing about young Dorian wasn’t that he was still alive; it was that he was even partly sane. Ellison’s thick brown hand hung over the keys. Arrogant as Secretary Moreland was, hitting Play was clearly unethical. No one, Ellison thought, deserved that.

“I thought I made myself clear. I’ve had
enough
of your self-indulgent, crackpot bull—”

Ellison’s finger snapped down, hard.

The room became deeply quiet. The woman in burgundy walked forward and gently spread both palms on the screen, then leaned close so that her cheek rested in the image’s center. Now the mermaid’s fins flowed again and again through her outstretched fingers. Everyone else turned to stare at Secretary Moreland. A sloppy, vacuous grin spread across his face, his jowls swayed, and a thread of drool spilled over his chin. He bobbed slightly in his chair and then let out a kind of shrill, ecstatic whimpering.

An almost subliminal flutter of music leaked from the earbuds. It was so quiet that they all felt it rather than heard it: a soft sonic mist that moistened their fingertips, altered the patterns of their breathing. Ben Ellison felt an urge to do something, but he couldn’t be sure what that something was. Vaguely he thought that the unbearable pressure swelling inside him might be relieved if he licked the walls, or took that young man’s head in his hands and planted bites as soft as kisses all over his cheeks, or dug out his own eyes so that the light could shine straight into his brain...

At the twenty-eighth second Secretary Moreland suddenly stood up. The cord for the earphones wasn’t long enough and they popped out of his head and thudded onto the conference table. The music drifted a bit louder then stopped. Ellison felt a whirl of unspeakable promises passing through him: promises of sensual pleasure and power and tenderness. They were all so
close,
so ready to burst in his mouth like grapes.

“Secretary Moreland?” The gray man’s voice was pitched so high that Ellison didn’t recognize it at first. Ellison thought the man might be trying to sing opera, and he made a confused effort to smile encouragingly. Beauty was universal, immediate, cataclysmic; of course the man should sing if he felt like it.

“Excuse me,” Moreland murmured absently. “A touch indisposed ... something I ate...” He was already shambling across the room, bumping against chairs. The door opened onto a luxurious sitting room. Ellison watched Moreland’s ink blue back receding, saw the bathroom door on the far side open and close.

Indisposed,
Ellison thought. That happened. He pictured Moreland huddled on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor; those tiles would be so white, so
gleaming.
It was hard not to feel envious.

Dimly he heard the water running.

Dimly he heard the presence of air, the outrageous splendor of electricity passing through the wires, the soft kittenish meows of the woman in the burgundy suit. The young man with the sky blue tie was embracing her from behind, his face nuzzling hard against her shoulder.

The water was still running. Maybe, Ellison thought, the water had been running for a long time. Wasn’t there some reason why you shouldn’t leave the tap open like that? Maybe someone should go and turn it off.

Maybe ... The gray man in beige jumped up and let out a warbling scream. That seemed uncalled for. “My God! People, snap out of it!” Then the gray man was bolting through the door and across the sitting room; Ellison heard a lamp topple and smash.

He was running, too. Something was very wrong. Something in the bathroom. He reached the bathroom door a fraction of a second behind the gray man, who was banging it wildly with both fists. Ellison felt himself pull the man away, but his own movements seemed floaty and sluggish, as if he were suspended in a cloud of feathers. He barely felt his own steps on the floor as he jumped back to get a running start, kicking the door as hard as he could. The wooden door frame split, and the door smashed open.

The first thing Ellison noticed was the sheet of water glossing over the side of the sink. That water looked so lovely, so inviting. Secretary Moreland’s thick, bent figure interrupted his view of it, though. The back of his inky suit was ripping down the center seam as he hunched forward, his hands clutching both sides of the sink while his face disappeared into the basin. Ellison heard peculiar gurgling sounds, and it occurred to him that Secretary Moreland might be drowning. Was that important? He reached to seize the inky shoulder, to haul it back, while the gray man appeared and tugged the Secretary from his other side. A crimson face burbled up from the basin and squealed, gray eyes slopping around in a way that reminded Ellison of ice cubes on a hot sidewalk. The Secretary’s dark, lumpy shape began to writhe, trying to throw them off. It looked like he was crying in frustration, though the trails of water dribbling all over his face and down his suit made it hard to tell. The bathroom was crowded with human bodies now, all of them scrabbling to get a hold on Secretary Moreland. The inky jacket tore again as they dragged him out of the bathroom and dumped him on the floor. A few of the men sat on him.

Moreland lay on the Persian carpet like some hideous primeval fish on a beach, weeping loudly. His face was blobby and scarlet, capped with twists of drenched white hair. He vomited a watery soup down his own front, still sobbing.

“Why don’t you ever let me do what I
want?”
Moreland whined. “Why can’t I...” He snuffled and stopped. “Why don’t I get to be
happy?”

Ellison felt terribly sorry for him. Maybe it was unfair to keep the poor, sweet man from getting to experience true happiness, just this once.