Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(142)

“What do you mean?”

“They don’t explain it. Oh, after the Big Bang, they can explain why and how it expanded as it did. But as to where it came from—that defeats them. Some say it came from nothing. They concoct grotesque unprovable theories that purport to show not only that something can come from nothing but that it happens all the time. Happens without reason, is an effect without a cause.”

In the chair, Ashley Bell closed her eyes in resignation, as though she detected some clue in the cadences of his speech by which she knew he would soon arrive at a crescendo that he intended to emphasize by slitting her throat.

“Quite a few philosophers,” Terezin continued, “including some of the most respected and enduring, say the world was imagined into existence. The scientists who insist something can come from nothing will ridicule the philosophers. But at least imagination suggests a cause and a power behind it. Considering that I exist by virtue of the story you’ve been telling yourself, I come down on the side of the philosophers.”

“What’s your point?”

He took the knife away from Ashley’s throat, allowing the light to wink off its point. “Fiction is a dangerous art,” he said again. “Creating worlds involves risks. Not risks just to readers who may be influenced toward darkness instead of light, evil instead of good, despair instead of hope, but also to the author.”

As long as the knife was not pressed to Ashley’s throat, Bibi could rush Terezin, bowl him off his feet. He might hit his head on the granite desktop, drop the knife. She could see how it might be done. Surprise him by going for the office chair in which the girl sat. Use her momentum and all her strength to wheel it backward into him. Imprudent, heedless of consequences. But considered action was always better than considered inaction. Yet she hesitated.

“When the author creates her characters,” Terezin said, “she may think she knows what suffering should and will befall those who, like me, choose power over anything else. However, with your imagination, linked as it is to paranormal abilities, you empowered me in ways you couldn’t anticipate.”

With his left hand, he gripped Ashley by her brow and pulled her head back and put the point of the blade against the skin behind her chin bone. The opportunity to attack him was lost.

“Another way to do her would be to thrust the blade straight up through her mouth, through the soft part of her palate, and into her brain. That would be quite a moment, don’t you think?”

Behind her closed lids, the girl’s eyes rolled.

Terezin’s eyes, which met Bibi’s and challenged her, were lustrous but absent all warmth, black ice.

Hitler had established the policies that led to the systematic extermination of millions, but he had never visited a death camp to watch whole families being shot or gassed and sometimes conveyed into crematoriums while half alive. He’d never visited a slave-labor camp to watch political prisoners, captured enemy soldiers, and Christian activists being starved and worked to death. When his cities were bombed, he did not once walk the ruins to encourage his citizens and improve their morale. He could order savage violence, but he was too fastidious to witness it.

If ever Terezin and his cult came to power, he would without compunction order mass murder, but he would also participate in it with pleasure.

“If you mean to kill this girl no matter what,” Bibi said, “you would’ve done that by now. You want something from me. What is it?”

“I’ll let you save her and save yourself. All I want in return is, when you walk out of this story of yours, you leave this world intact. You leave it to me as my playground.”

She thought he must be toying with her. “But this is all…imagined.”

“Somewhere Huck Finn lives in his world, having adventures Twain never dreamed of. Sherlock Holmes is solving new cases even now.”

Bibi hesitated to answer, afraid of saying the wrong thing.

He was a megalomaniac, insane by any standard, though capable of functioning—and succeeding—in society, not unlike Hitler. If he truly believed that a fictional world continued to exist when the book ended, that on some mystical plane it was real and eternally rotating on its axis, there might be a way out of this impasse.

“Leave all this intact?” she said at last, playing along with him, indicating the grand room and the fogbound world beyond. “How does that work?”

“Finish the story. Publish it.”

“You want me to sit down and write—”

“No. You’ve already imagined most of it. It’s in your head, just imagine it being on your computer, the computer in your apartment, in the world you were born into.”

She almost protested that he had confiscated the computer in her apartment and that she had thrown away her laptop, tossed it into the back of a landscaper’s truck, when she was being sought by his men in the helicopter. Then she realized that those things had happened in this world, in this story, not in the real world, where she was dying of gliomatosis cerebri.

Her confusion, even if brief, seemed to be evidence that the brain cancer was corrupting her intellectual capacity.

“I could jam this shiv into her brain through an eyeball,” he said. “I could cut off her lips first, and her nose, and you couldn’t stop me.”

“You can have this world,” Bibi said, certain that he would not be this easily deceived, that violence was coming no matter what she said or did.