51

The old man got off the Sloan City bus, tailed closely by Merry.

They had arrived in the southeast corner of the city, close to the baseball stadium, close to the train station. Merry ducked behind telephone poles and giant ceramic mockups of plain donuts, anything to avoid detection by the old man. What was his name? Merry had known it for a while at least briefly.

DOWN THE WELL! Oh! She abruptly remembered.

"When you join the Serpentines, they take your name." The old man came to a ticket vending machine just outside this train station. On the side of the machine was a stencilled-on graffiti of ... of him!

Except the graffiti was wearing glasses, but otherwise the old man's likeness was clear. Since there was no other graffiti around, Merry wondered if the old man was somehow "favored" by city government and they selectively enforced the vandalism laws, leaving the ones they approved of. The image had occupied this position for years, too.

The station was quiet, because it was after midnight and the last train had left the station for the night. Only a few wobbly-looking guys remained, hanging around.

So there was barely anybody watching, and Down-the-Well touched the nose on the imprinted image of his own face.

Holy cow! On some kind of timer or deep controller, the entire metal console of the machine rose a foot higher, with a slow grinding whirrr. Then the chassis began to tip to one side. A secret door! So Down-the-Well wasn't just senile.

Merry hid behind a stunted palm. Down-the-Well waited for the buzz to subside, then stepped forward.

She couldn't quite see. Soon he was out of view. She peered around at the other observers and did not spy any interest in anyone else's eyes, at least not much. She took a step forward.

I'm going in, she thought. I just am. Could anything be that weird and be unconnected to all of the other weird shit going on?

"No." She said it out loud. She looked at the now open machine. It was a well. Down the well, huh. It had bricks and everything. The old man had found a metal grille staircase which hugged the inside perimeter of the well pipe.

She took a tentative step.

I can't see it and not take a step, she thought. I got this far. And I'm sure it's connected. More facades. There's something about now. The revolutions per minute have just been cranked up somehow.

Details from the Charlie incident assaulted her mind like a flash bulb firing. They burned in on her retina. Ghosts. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the lighthouse, pirate talk, Charlie, Charlie in his tunic with the maroon stripe down the arm and a TV screen or monitor on his chest, it was like a film she couldn't shake some three months later as it rolled forward and back, forward and back. Brundtland giving a toothy smile, her cropped hair, like brush bristles, good humor tempered by smoke.

Killed. I don't care if it's a complete anomaly. Maybe the thought, the belief was constructed from whole cloth and grafted in my memory with no rhyme or reason or precedent-- I can't help it. At some level we are all slaves to our epistemology and if something had taken a pair of rose colored glasses, or yellow or blue and soldered it up my eyes like an amoral electronics whiz kid, what can I be expected to do about how I see the world?

She walked down the well and vanished entirely from street level. Water dripped. Crickets chirped. The bricks were knitted in careful attention. Finally as the drops of water on her head was beginning to feel like a thousand cuts, she heard a voice.

"Yes, Madame Sparko."

"Jeez, can I get nothing done around here?"

"I'm sorry, Madame Sparko."

Merry ducked once again behind a vertical telephone pole.

Through a porthole she could see a woman - Stacy Sun by the looks of it, conversing with a tall reedy man with a shorn head. Familiar.

"All right!" said Stacy who apparently was going by the name of Madame Sparko. "It's time we got very linear and methodical, otherwise we're not going to make it. The revolutions just got bumped up. Edward?"

"Yes, Madame Sparko."

Edward! thought Merry. I knew it!

"Ahhhh!"

It was the old man. Merry suddenly remembered that she had followed the old man down here in the first place.

"I don't know 'bout them birducks."

The old man seemed a little bats, and Merry felt sorry for him, even in this odd distracted setting. Since she had seen him last, he had ditched his Members Only and was now going around in a furry black coat, which looked to Merry like a previously-owned woman's coat, discarded by its prior owner.

"Down-the-Well," cried Madame Sparko. "We don't have time for your bird ducks! Report on your progress, please!"

Down-the-Well nodded. "Sam Raimi," he said. "Film director. Sam Cooke, soul singer. Sam Moore, also a singer. Sam Wood, Marx Brothers manager and director. Graham Bond!"

The old man's scraggly hair made him seem senile but when he started to deliver the monologue, reading literally off a napkin, he seemed at once more articulate and more resonant, like Sean Connery. With every new Sam and Graham, he took on a more booming voice, gathering steam as he gathered Sams and Grahams to be placed on pins by the butterfly collector.

"That's very good," Madame Sparko said. "Yes ... yes ... I'm registering 472 more milliliters' worth of power in the arc. Down-the-Well, I am pleased to discover my faith in you was not misplaced." Down-the-Well took a little bow.

Merry smiled and then she cried out before she could stop herself. "Mom!"

Because as she stood behind a porthole window, peering in on Madame Sparko, Madame Sparko peered in on Edward through some kind of fancy videoconferencing screen and way on the other side of town, Edward was meanwhile being observed by Mary from behind a wall. The jig was up, as she blew her cover and the whole little brouhaha became a free-for-all-melee.

"Oh god!" she said, as Madame Sparko stormed back angrily.

"What is the meaning of this!" cried Madame Sparko. Merry was too tired to protest.

"Ha," she said, with the tired eyes of a person who has come so far, too far to argue, that they can meet strangers and dive right into the next thread in a matter of seconds, with no matter towards pleasantries, doubling back or wasting time saying, "What? I don't understand."

It was instant familiarity on the lowest common level of the human beings.

"I don't know you," Merry said. "But I recognize you."

"I was an actress," Madame Sparko said, taking a few steps in her leather boots. "In a past life."

She considered Merry contemptuously. "Down-the-Well, round me up some sparking power from the Sams and the Grahams, would you? I want her killed."

Down-the-Well nodded curtly. "As you wish, Madame."

"Why Sams and Grahams?" asked Merry all of a sudden.

And Madame Sparko felt obliged to answer. "We need warm bodies. To make energy, we need warm bodies, and we shunt them around on a ... a ... thing. And that runoff drives a turbine, and the turbine gives us electricity. But we didn't need that many people. Too many can be as bad as too few. Getting us the Sams and the Grahams seemed as good a way as any to break it down. We chose Sams and Grahams because there were going to be just about the perfect number of people. When you put it together there would be too many Johnnys and not enough Stuarts. Although actually, we toyed with the idea of stirring in the Jackies too."

"Begging your pardon, ma'am," said Down-the-Well. He apparently had found his true voice, because his skin had cleared up and he seemed to have lost ten pounds and ten years. His nose was less beaky now, and his beard had become manicured, or at least trimmed neatly.

"But--" he continued over the tidal swell of his own adjectives. "I got directions from the box!"

Madame Sparko raised her eyebrows. "What did it say?" she asked.

"It said Hamel was unnecessary. It said his questions might pose a problem."

"What did you do?"

"Vaporized him, Madame Sparko."

"You killed Alan?"

"Yes mum."

Merry raised her eyebrows - Alan Hamel? From lunch?

"Very well," said Madame Sparko without missing a beat. "The box ... it gets its wish." She seemed to shudder.

"Pfft --" said Merry aloud.

Sparko shot her a look of emerald green fire, and blue ice.

But the unspoken vitriol passed, and Madame Sparko leaned on a chair for support.

"Well ..." she said, and took an extra beat's worth of time, her shoulders hunched. "Who ... who else do we need to contact? Who haven't we heard from?"

Merry heard a musical interruption and didn't know what it was. She shook her head. Disruption, deceit and despair. She had had enough. She had no motivations or wishes. She sat on a stoop, half expecting to be corralled by burly gendarmes. But she wasn't. She listened and sat still and was left alone.

"Sound off! Who haven't we ---" Madame Sparko's voice was shaking. She was having trouble standing.