12
Their fourth consecutive day underground brought the frustration of ignorance.
Jay sat across from Billy, Alice and their newfound and rather mysterious friend Faraji. The small boy had been very shy so far, hardly saying a word to anyone but his mother, barely even eating. His skin was a shining black and his eyes were as quiet as his personality but always looked wide awake and courageous. Recently he and Billy had even become friends. A remarkable fact, thought Jay, especially in the wake of his father's death. It is like he has managed to hide his fear of what had happened. But given the already unbelievable circumstances his family was going through and how he himself felt, the boy's quietude was beyond impressive. The boy is a stoic, or close to one as one I’ve ever met.
Since Blake had disappeared without a trace into the mists of his own artistic daring, the librarians' journey from relative normalcy to their present condition had been a strange one. Jay had actually been upstairs watching from the window, hoping that his brother might return, when the ravens and their master arrived. He watched without interest through the descending dusk as a jet black shadow glided into the library doorway and made a sharp rapping against the door, and then saw it drift away again as its master walked down the path to the door. Rip must have answered the door and, when the other man requested to speak with him, brought him into the main living quarters. Their conversation was private, though Jay was curious enough at the whole matter's oddity to come downstairs.
The library was a place open to all, so long as all were peaceful and so Jay took little notice of the other man's ragged appearance as he walked by the two conversing. He sat in the kitchen and talked with Graham, but it wasn't long before Rip called him into the room and he saw that something was very much out of the ordinary.
Rip's face immediately conveyed an uncommon concern that Jay had never seen. He was almost always happy and fearless, a man who relied heavily on his faith in the good. When Jay saw his face though, these qualities were buried under an oppressive weight.
"Sit down, my boy."
Jay sat and looked at them both expectantly. Rip first introduced the old man as Odin.
"I know for all certainty," he started, "that this will sound unreal to you now and, truly, I'm very sorry I must say it but . . .
"Well," he sighed, " the simple fact is that we have to move. You, your brother, Alice, and Ruby, Graham, Ryan, and myself, we've real need to move to a safer place. This man here," he gestured to the old man," although I don't know him personally, has come here on behalf of someone I trust fully to tell us of a danger that we surely must flee from."
Jay cut in. Quietly:
"What about Blake? Is this about him?" He asked.
Rip shook his head.
"No, not exactly, at any rate. Although our friend here fears he might be mixed up in this business, which . . ." he paused to look at Odin, "I confess myself I don't yet fully understand, Blake isn't strictly speaking what the trouble is about. But I think we really need to leave. How soon can you and Billy be ready? The family and I are leaving tonight, as soon as possible."
Jay shook his head.
"What about Blake?” he asked. “If we leave and there's some sort of trouble . . . We can’t just abandon him. I know he's gone now, but what if he does comes back? No one will be here.”
In response Odin spoke for the first time since Jay had entered the room. Jay was struck by his voice in proximity; it sounded foregone and crackled like a broken microphone. Something both ancient and mechanical—hard to reconcile.
"If you stay here and wait for your brother to return, it is unlikely that you will still be here to meet him. But there is a way that you might help him."
"And what is that?"
"Leave him a note, a cryptic note, one that only he would understand because he is your brother. Something from your past, a shared experience perhaps, something that he would not even think to say in conversation, to anyone, but would understand. It must also direct him to this." He held out a long bony arm and opened his hand to reveal a messenger cell phone, silver in color, with a slide out keyboard. It looked like it was over ten years old, beat up and riddled with cracks and scratches. The man dropped it into Jay's outstretched palm.
Jay wasn’t sure. It seemed like an easy explanation to a difficult problem. He sat in silence a moment until Rip finally managed to convince him.
"Please, boy. You must do this, you must trust me, if not him. I will explain what I can later."
And so he trusted, because over their short stay they had learned that Rip was a good person. He took the phone and hid it. He wrote a note and gave it to the old man who walked upstairs and stuck it directly on the door of their bedroom. Then everyone packed up their things quickly, quietly, and left like ghosts. As he and his brother were walking out the door, Jay saw the old man check the whole living room, walk over to the couch and stick something small, almost infinitesimal on the wall opposite the door to the corridor. The boys and family meandered through a surreal haze of confusion, taking a myriad of turns, finally descending into an underground area that none of them knew existed or could find later without the old man's help.
A few answers came later, slowly, over the following day and a half. Rip told Jay and Billy, after they arrived at the safehouse, that this old man, strange as he appeared, was a friend of someone he knew over a decade ago, long before his days living the library. This person was, he said, absolutely to be trusted although—he murmured in a very low tone—he was less sure about Odin himself. Jay appreciated Rip's honest explanation but found it begging other questions. Every time he sought to truly dig into the conflict itself, he could only manage to find half truths, pieces of information, parts of an unfathomable whole that left him feeling tortured.
He knew, because Odin had told them all, that the people looking for them were likely some sort of shadow ops, that none of them, himself included, could compete with them in a test of brute force, and if they met with them they would either be killed or captured and taken into an endless reformatory period. They were dangerous and ruthless, like magi or warrior priests from Japanese tales. He knew that they were looking for Nkiruka, the African woman, Gus, the huge Polish man and their children. He knew that, somehow their flight had endangered those of them in the library. These things he knew, these things had been stated. But when Jay tried to ask why, for the reason behind the reason or for the deeper reason behind that, closed mouths always left him frustrated and ignorant.
Why were Gus and Nkiruka being pursued? Why were they so vilified? He had asked the question before the group, and instantly saw Nkiruka's jaw seize in a show of strength and pride and her face lift and he knew she would not even look in his direction much less reveal the answer to him, a stranger. Odin deflected his question in tacit compliance to the look on Nkiruka's face, his own expression completely unreadable.
On the third day, life assumed a bizarre rhythm that would frustrate them and save them all at once. At first, the lines between the two parties proved strong and the Outskirts squatters kept apart from the Kingston's and the brothers. Feelings of mutual mistrust made life in the vast underground complex increasingly difficult for everyone. Nkiruka and Faraji secluded themselves in a self-imposed period of mourning for husband and father, and Nkiruka looked at everyone but her son with a vicious and stubborn anger that, Gus told Jay during breakfast the day before, was born of sadness and grief, not real malice.
Gus and Jess also remained apart from the beginning of it all, although they felt the loss of their home acutely, it seemed to the outside eye that Gus simply wanted to keep his daughter attended to and perhaps worried greatly that the intense trauma of their flight would find the young girl more vulnerable than anyone else.
Odin did nothing to mediate between the two parties and in fact was rarely present; he would disappear for hours at a time without a word to anyone and despite protestations among the Kingstons delayed telling them the truth behind why he had brought them here. Everyone started to feel like prisoners.
In the end it was Billy and Faraji who saved them all from the mistrust and stagnation of the place.
Billy was beginning to tire of his brother's company by the third day and set out to explore the full reach of their living space. He discovered after a half an hour of walking that it was a massive area, too big even to explore in a couple hours; full of doors, some locked, others left ajar as if they hadn't been used in years. Full of dust and mystery, it seemed like a place that could freeze time and distort space.
He continued walking and after another five minutes rounded a sharp corner and nearly jumped with fright as Faraji stopped just short of him, looking equally surprised.
There was a brief moment when neither boy knew what to do or say before both realized with pleasure that they were doing the very same thing. Faraji shrugged lightly and turned around motioning for Billy to follow him. Billy shrugged also behind the other boy and they continued on their youthful adventure together. The labyrinthine passages of the place were confusing to them both and they probably would have gotten lost had they not been leaving a trail of half-pint footprints in the thick dust of the seemingly endless corridors. After perhaps another hour in which neither spoke but both held an unspoken agreement that they should go as far as they could, finally they came to a broad thick rusty door and pushed it open.
The room through the door amazed Billy and he gasped. Faraji just looked at him and wondered at it. In the same dim monotonal light of the whole maze, it was a work of technological art. The room itself wasn't state of the art, in fact it looked strangely old, but nevertheless its massive and intricate network of machines and buttons, all dead and unblinking was a rather incredible sight.
On a whim Billy pulled out his audio player, which he almost never went anywhere without, and walked over to the wall adjacent the door where a tall rack of speakers were collecting dust; he didn't know how old they were or if his idea would work but he started an application meant to wirelessly pipe music to outside electronics. He had never tested the application but he hoped it would work on almost any device regardless of model or age.
Almost instantly the music hit the boys ears with a beautiful ferocity. Faraji at first was rather amazed and taken aback but soon followed Billy's lead into the music of the moment and the two young boys started to dance in the gloom of the dusty room; they danced the dust into the air even after the room's smothering murk made it hard to breathe and song after song after song after song until the music stopped abruptly.
A tall figure appeared in the doorway. It was Odin.
"It's time to go back. Your families wish for your return.”
The boys were disappointed, but they jumped in tow without much complaint and retraced their imprinted footsteps all the way back to their families. The incident was only a frivolous one, but it united the adults in worry for their children. It showed them that they could, despite history, forget their mistrust and dance in the music of unexplored territory.