“They’ve been very good to me here.”
“As well they should. You know, my dear, I’ve been terribly worried about you. The entire Anthropology Department has. We can’t wait for your return.”
“Neither can I.”
“Your location has been almost a state secret. Until yesterday, I never even knew this place existed. As it was, I had to charm my way past half the staff.” He smiled.
Margo smiled back. If anyone could charm his way in, Menzies could. She’d been lucky to get him as her supervisor: many museum curators lorded it over their minions, behaving like conceited philosopher-kings. Menzies was the exception: affable, receptive to the ideas of others, supportive of his staff. It was true-she couldn’t wait to get out of here and back to work. Museology, the periodical she edited, was rudderless in her absence. If only she didn’t grow tired so easily…
She realized her mind was drifting. She roused herself, glanced at Menzies. He was looking back at her, concern on his face.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m still a little out of it.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “Perhaps that’s why this is still necessary?” And he nodded at the saline drip hanging beside the bed.
“The doctor said that’s just a precautionary measure. I’m getting plenty of fluids now.”
“Good, very good. The loss of blood must have been a severe shock. So much blood, Margo. There’s a reason they call it the living liquid, don’t you agree?”
A strange current, almost like a physical shock, passed through Margo. The weakness, the feeling of torpor, receded. She suddenly felt wide awake. “What did you say?”
“I said, have they given you any indication of when you can leave?”
Margo relaxed. “The doctors are very pleased with my progress. Another two weeks or so.”
“And then bed rest at home, I assume?”
“Yes. Dr. Winokur-that’s my primary physician here-said I would need another month’s recuperation before returning to work.”
“He would know best.”
Menzies’s voice was low and soothing, and Margo felt torpidity returning. Almost without realizing it, she yawned.
“Oh!” she said, embarrassed anew. “I’m sorry.”
“Think nothing of it. I don’t want to overstay my welcome, I’ll leave shortly. Are you tired, Margo?”
She smiled faintly. “A little bit.”
“Sleeping all right?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I was worried you might have been having nightmares.” Menzies glanced over his shoulder, toward the open door and the corridor beyond.
“No, not really.”
“That’s my girl! What spunk!”
There: that strange electric tingle again. Menzies’s voice had changed-something about it was both foreign and disquietingly familiar. “Dr. Menzies,” she began, sitting up once more.
“Now, now, you just sit back and rest.” And with a gentle but firm pressure on her shoulder, he guided her back down onto the pillow. “I’m so glad to hear you’re sleeping well. Not everybody could put such a traumatic event behind them.”
“It’s not exactly behind me,” she said. “I just don’t seem to remember what happened very well, that’s all.”
Menzies laid a comforting hand on hers. “That’s just as well,” he said, slipping his other hand inside his jacket.
Margo felt an inexplicable sense of alarm. She was tired-that’s all it was. Much as she liked Menzies, much as she appreciated this break in the monotony, she needed to rest.
“After all, nobody would want such memories. The noises in the empty exhibition hall. Being followed. The invisible footfalls, the falling of boards. The sudden darkness.”
Margo felt an unfocused panic well up within her. She stared at Menzies, unable to wrap her mind around what he was saying. The anthropologist kept on talking in his low, soothing voice.
“Laughter in the blackness. And then, the plunge of the knife… No, Margo. Nobody would want those memories.”
And then Menzies himself laughed. But it wasn’t his voice. No: it was another voice, another voice entirely: a hideous, dry chuckle.
A sudden dreadful shock burned through the gathering lethargy. No. Oh, no. It couldn’t be…
Menzies sat in the chair, looking at her intently, as if gauging the effect of his words.
Then he winked.
Margo tried to pull away, opened her mouth to scream. But even as she did so, the feeling of lassitude intensified, flooding her limbs, leaving her unable to speak or move. She had a desperate realization that the lethargy wasn’t normal, that something was happening to her…
Menzies let his hand fall away from hers, and as he did so, she saw-with a thrill of horror-that his other hand had been concealed beneath. It held a tiny syringe, which was injecting a colorless liquid into the IV tube at her wrist. Even as she watched, he withdrew the syringe, palmed it, then replaced it in his suit jacket.
“My dear Margo,” he said, sitting back, his voice so very different now. “Did you really think you’d seen the last of me?”
Panic, and a desperate desire to survive, surged within her-yet she felt utterly powerless against the drug that was spreading through her veins, silencing her voice and paralyzing her limbs. Menzies swept to his feet, placed a finger against his lips, and whispered, “Time to sleep, Margo…”
The hated darkness surged in, blotting out sight and thought. Panic, shock, and disbelief fell aside as the mere act of drawing breath became a struggle. As she lay paralyzed, Margo saw Menzies turn and hasten from the room, heard his faint yelling for a nurse. But then his voice, too, was subsumed into the hollow roar that filled her head, and darkness gathered in her eyes until the roar dwindled into blackness and eternal night, and she knew no more.
Chapter 18
Four days after their meeting with Menzies, the sound-and-light show was finally installed and ready for debugging, and that night they were pulling the final cables, hooking everything up. Jay Lipper crouched by the dusty hole near the floor of the Hall of the Chariots, listening to various sounds emerging from the hole: grunts, heavy breathing, muttered curses. It was the third night in a row they’d worked on the install into the wee hours of the morning, and he was dog-tired. He couldn’t take much more of this. The exhibition had basically taken over his life. All his guildmates in Land of Darkmord had given up on him and continued with the online game. By now, they’d leveled up once, maybe twice, and he was hopelessly behind.
“Got it?” came DeMeo’s muffled voice from the hole. Lipper looked down to see the end of a fiber-optic cable poking out of the blackness.
Lipper seized the end. “Got it.”
He pulled it through, then waited for DeMeo to come around from the other side. Soon DeMeo’s blocky figure, backlit and faint in the dim light of the tomb, came huffing down the passageway, cables coiled about his massive shoulders. Lipper handed him the cable end and DeMeo plugged it into the back of a PowerBook sitting on a nearby
