Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(140)
One enemy remained. In this world as in the one where she had been born, the ultimate enemy couldn’t be dispatched with violence.
In the wall behind the desk, three doors were paneled with the same white quartz that surrounded them. She chose the middle of the three, which stood under the red-and-black symbol of totalitarian power. Beyond the door lay a hallway that she followed to an elevator alcove. When she pressed the call button, one of six sets of doors slid open, and she boarded that car. According to the car-station panel, there were four aboveground floors and a basement. The 4 lit without her touch, the doors slid shut, and she was whisked upward.
In this world of her invention, she had imagined other people with power, and none more than he into whose lair she now ventured. She thought of Kelsey Faulkner, the silversmith and father of this man, half his face handsome, the other half ruined. She thought of Kelsey’s wife, Beth, mother of the man now awaiting her, raped by her own son, stabbed twenty-three times, acid poured on her face. He took their money, unspecified items of value, and set out upon a new life, that teenage boy obsessed with Hitler and the occult.
In the end, after Bibi had endured four Taserings, once she had understood that she possessed the power, Chubb Coy had been easily edited away, his role truncated to five appearances. But he had been a minor character and rather poorly imagined, with no past other than a reference to having been a police detective. By contrast, Robert Warren Faulkner, alias Birkenau Terezin, had a vivid and twisted past, a violent pathology that made him memorable. Besides, since this had begun, all the others who obstructed her were either members of Terezin’s cult or in some way allied with him, which made him the spider at the center of the web, the primary antagonist. She could not edit him from existence without collapsing this entire imagined world. Only the most formulaic authors always knew when they began a story what the fate of their lead would be. When writing organically, allowing characters their free will, the author could be surprised by who died and who lived in the final act.
The elevator arrived at the fourth floor. She stepped out of the alcove into a wide, dimly lighted corridor with closed offices on both sides. At the farther end, a door stood open. The light beyond shone somewhat brighter. She walked toward it.
She was afraid but not frozen by her fear. Wary, heedful, and prudent, yes, because Valiant girls were always wary, heedful, and prudent. She had come here to save the life of Ashley Bell, and she realized now that somehow, if she accomplished that, she would also save herself from the death by cancer that threatened her in the world that was not of her imagination, though she didn’t understand why this should be so. If she failed Ashley Bell, she failed herself.
Beyond the open door lay a very long room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling thirty feet high and walls curving to the floor. Olympian. Not human in scale. Reminiscent of designs by Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer. The ceiling and walls were paneled in light cherrywood finished with multiple coats of lacquer, glossy, with the depth of colored crystal, softly but dramatically lit by gold-leafed wall sconces that cast narrow fans of light both up and down. Here were the windows that Bibi earlier had thought were glowing spheres, mysteriously hovering in the fog, seven-foot-diameter portholes, concave from this side, the panes captured in bronze muntins. Along the center of the wide chamber, the polished black-granite floor did not reflect any of the wall lights, and Bibi felt almost as if deep space lay underfoot, an interplanetary void where she walked without the pull of gravity.
At the farther end of the room, before a wall hung with a tapestry replicating the red circle and black lightning bolts first seen in the reception hall, was an immense stainless-steel-and-black-granite desk unsuited to anyone but a mythic figure. If behind it had waited the Minotaur, with a human body and the head of a bull, or a horned mongrel as much goat as man, or some beast with furled wings and luminous green eyes, the desk and its owner would have been properly matched.
Instead, waiting for her was a tall athletic man in a slim-cut black suit of superb tailoring, a white shirt, and a black necktie, with a red display handkerchief in his breast pocket. Seventeen years later, he was recognizable as the boy of sixteen who murdered his mother and left his disfigured father for dead. He still parted his coal-black hair severely and combed it to the left across his brow, though anyone unaware of his obsession with the Third Reich would not interpret the style as an homage to Hitler.
To an extent, his good looks would insulate him from suspicion, for in this new century, image trumped substance and appearance often mattered more than truth. He had been a handsome boy, and he’d become a man with movie-star features and a glamorous aura. Hitler and most of the Nazi party hierarchy had been unattractive men, doughy and chinless like Himmler or brutish like Hess and Bormann, in some cases even macabre, and yet they had led a great nation into hell on earth and a world into chaos and destruction. Had they looked like this Terezin creature, perhaps they would have enraptured even more true believers and would have triumphed.
As Bibi approached, the elegant murderer came out from behind his desk and stood beside an office chair in which sat a young girl, her back to Bibi. The lustrous, champagne-blond hair was like that of Ashley Bell in the photograph found at Calida’s house.
To Terezin, Bibi said, “Why do totalitarians—communists and fascists alike—favor the colors black and red?”
The timbre of his voice, a masculine resonance halfway between bass and tenor, was a weapon as useful as his good looks. “Black for death, the power of life and death. Red for the blood of those who won’t respect that power. Or maybe it’s because they’re the colors of the roulette wheel, the colors of fate. Our fate is to rule, your fate is to be ruled. We are agents of fate, enforcing its dictates.”