As the kid’s Ray-Bans came into his peripheral vision, he saw that they hadn’t broken,
When he was in the doorway, he tossed the black driver to the kid, who missed catching it. It hit the Heavy Gear II poster and dropped out of sight behind the counter.
RYDELL found a laundromat-cafй combination, called Vicious Cycle, that had one hotdesk at the back, behind a black plastic curtain. The curtain suggested to him that people used this to access porn sites, but why you’d want to do that in a laundromat was beyond him.
He was glad of the curtain anyway, because he hated the idea of people watching him talk to people who weren’t there, so he generally avoided accessing websites in public places. He didn’t know why using the phone, audio, wasn’t embarrassing that way. It just wasn’t. When you were using the phone you didn’t actually look like you were talking to people who weren’t there, even though you were. You were talking to the phone. Although, now that he thought about it, using the phone in the earpiece of the Brazilian glasses would look that way too.
So he pulled the curtain shut and stood there in the background rumble of the dryers, a sound he’d always found sort of comforting. The glasses were already cabled to the hotdesk. He put them on and worked the rocker-pad, inputting the address.
There was a brief and probably entirely symbolic passage through some kind of neon rain, heavy on the pinks and greens, and then he was there.
Looking into that same empty space that he’d glimpsed in Tong’s 124 corridor: some kind of dust-blown, sepulchral courtyard, lit from above by a weird, attenuated light.
This time though, he could look up. He did. He seemed to be standing on the floor of a vast empty air shaft that rose up, canyon-like, between walls of peculiarly textured darkness.
High above, a skylight he guessed to be the size of a large swimming pool passed grimy sunlight through decades of soot and what he took, at this distance, to be drifts of something more solid. Black iron mu!lions divided long rectangles, some of them holed, as by gunfire, through what he guessed was archaic wire-cored safety glass.
When he lowered his head, they were there, the two of them, seated in strange, Chinese-looking chairs that hadn’t been there before.
One of them was a thin, pale man in a dark suit from no particular era, his lips pursed primly. He wore glasses with heavy, rectangular frames of black plastic and a snap-brim hat of a kind that RydelI knew only from old films. The hat was positioned dead level on his head, perhaps an inch above the black frames. His legs were crossed, and Rydell saw that he wore black wingtip oxfords. His hands were folded in his lap.
The other presented in far more abstract form: an only vaguely human figure, the space where its head should have been was coronaed in a cyclical and on-going explosion of blood and matter, as though a sniper’s victim, in the instant of impact, had been recorded and looped. The halo of blood and brains flickered, never quite attaining a
steady state. Beneath it, an open mouth, white teeth exposed in a permanent, silent scream. The rest, except for the hands, clawed as in agony around the gleaming arms of the chair, seemed constantly to be dissolving in some terrible fiery wind. Rydell thought of black-and-white footage, ground zero, sb-mo atomic hurricane.
“Mr. Rydell,” said the one with the hat, “thank you for coming. You may call me Klaus. This,” and he gestured with a pale, papery-looking hand, which immediately returned to his lap, “is the Rooster.”
The one called the Rooster didn’t move at all when it spoke, but the open mouth flickered in and out of focus. Its voice was either the soundcollage from Tong’s or another like it. “Listen to me, Rydell. You are now 125 responsible for something of the utmost importance, the greatest possible value. Where is it?”
“I don’t know who you are,” Rydell said. “I’m not telling you anything.”
Neither responded, and then Klaus coughed dryly. “The only proper answer. You would be wise to maintain that position. Indeed, you have no idea who we are, and if we were to reappear to you at some later time, you would have no way of knowing that we were, in fact, us.”