Disgusted, I started to ease the door shut, then hesitated, certain my senses were playing tricks. Nope. The music was definitely louder here. And, at the very back corner, a thin strip of yellow marred the perfect darkness.
Using my new buddy “Brassy the Wonderdog,” I propped the door open, then reached in and tentatively poked at a slick, wooden broom handle. It didn’t move. Didn’t budge, in fact. I began to tug on one after the other, until I realized they were—each and every one—fastened to the back wall. Bolted, as if they were only a display.
Then I saw it. The stray cotton strand of an upside-down mop that was pinned, snagged in the seam of light. When I yanked hard on the knotted thread, the entire thing—brooms and all—opened noiselessly toward me. Music poured over me, washing up a set of wooden steps that led downward into the shadows.
I grinned. “Gotcha.”
One seemingly endless flight down, I emerged into what appeared to be the manor’s cellar. The space was enormous. A low, barrel-vaulted ceiling was supported by a row of stone pillars that curved away into a shadowy darkness.
I shivered in the chill. My slippered feet whispered on the paving stones as I wove through the detritus left behind by two centuries of Carlyles and MacPhersons. Modern light fixtures mounted at intervals to the rough brick wall cast shadows on the swept-clean path. Muscles tense, I breathed in musty air and the rich, mineral smell of earth.
All right, I’m under the ground. Under. The. Ground. Those pillars probably hold the weight of the entire house on their shoulders. What if they collapse? What if it—
I shut that thought down before it could fully form. Forcing myself not to turn and flee back up the stairs, I moved along the wall, following the music. At a modern doorway, an odd, alien light filtered out from beneath, glowing green on the stones. It was quickly muted when I opened the unlocked door and a series of fluorescent bulbs buzzed to life overhead.
If the library was all dusty rugs, antique lamps, and the solace of old books and leather, this room was its polar opposite. The gleaming, white-tiled floor showed not a speck of dirt. Towering ultramodern glass-doored cabinets ran along the entire length of the left wall, directly across from three large, curtained booths.
Here, the music—that I now recognized as heavy metal—battered at my eardrums. Bracing my hands over my ears, I approached a department-store-quality mirror. Three pale, wild-haired reflections glared back at me.
Yeesh.
Snatching the tartan stretchie I found in the bathroom off my wrist, I raked my medusa curls back into a high pony-tail and searched for the source of the punishing sound.
The eerie glow had come from the far side of the room, where the biggest monitor I’d ever seen was mounted to the wall, connected to a series of massive computers. I quickly reached out and flipped down the volume on a set of huge desk speakers.
My ears rang in the glorious silence. Finally able to think straight, I stepped back and stared up. Hundreds of green lines streaked across the screen from one side to the other, all of them intersecting only in the very center. Every so often, a line flashed from green to red in a pattern I couldn’t begin to interpret.
The curved desk was littered with empty cups and dirty dishes. An executive chair was pushed back as though someone had left in a hurry. The screen saver on the lone desktop monitor shifted. A slide show of the blue-haired Phoebe. First grinning and backlit by the sun. Then looking down, her gaze gone soft and sweet as she held a newborn lamb in her arms.
Either she liked to look at herself—a lot—or whoever ran this operation had a major thing for her. When I touched the mouse, her image faded to reveal an Excel spreadsheet with thousands of numerical notations.
A piece of paper was taped to the edge of a shelf just above the desktop. Handwritten on it were the words “The universe is big. It’s vast and complicated and ridiculous. And sometimes—very rarely—impossible things just happen and we call them miracles.” The Doctor.
Doctor? My gaze flicked to the picture beside it that showed a plain-faced, floppy-haired guy sporting a bow tie. He didn’t look like any doctor I’d ever heard of.
Shrugging, I checked out the other taped-up printouts. Pictures of Einstein. Steven Hawking. Isaac Newton. Leonardo da Vinci. In the center hung a large glossy photo of a young Nikola Tesla.
Alongside the wall monitor was a large rectangular black board. On it, digital lines of yellow text flipped by so fast, even I barely had time to commit them to memory.
Antwerp 111713.21
Istanbul 041099.12
Brighton 071817.07
Vienna 111938.18
Boston 011788.06
I studied the strange panel for a long moment. I’d seen one for the first time only two days before.
“An airport arrival and departure board?” I whispered, frowning as the letters unscrambled and replaced themselves with astounding speed. “Why? What is it tracking?”
Some of the lines changed more slowly than others. One, near the bottom, reappeared again and again.
London 121154.04