Devoted(102)
He meant to walk among the stacks, admiring his acquisitions. Turning a corner into the nearest aisle, however, he got a whiff of a subtle, disturbing smell. Unable to locate the source, he wondered if it was mold or another affliction of paper. His bookman would have to track it down. His enthusiasm for a tour waned.
He’d not yet had time to read any of the volumes in his world-class collection, but that didn’t matter. The library served two primary purposes. It added class to the residence. Second, more important, it allowed him to have a bookcase that was a hidden door, like those in old spooky movies—Karloff, Lugosi!—that he’d thought were cool ever since he was a kid who’d been into retro films.
When he said “Ochus Bochus,” the name of a mythical Norse magician and demon, a voice-recognition program unlocked the door and swung it open on powered pivot hinges. He stepped into a secret corridor, one of a network of such behind the walls of the house, and said, “Hoc est corpus meum,” which instructed the bookcase door to close and lock.
At the end of the secret corridor was a secret door disguised as a wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling mirror. No one on the staff knew of these hidden passageways, and he cleaned this mirror himself from time to time. He took a moment to admire his reflection. He thought he looked wonderfully mysterious. Then he found the concealed latch in the looking-glass frame and opened the door.
Beyond were secret stairs leading up and secret stairs leading down. He descended to a twelve-foot-square space lined on three sides with some of the most expensive books in his collection. Yet another hidden door pivoted open when he declared, “Abracadabra,” and he passed through into a vestibule as sequestered as any forgotten catacomb sealed off a millennium earlier.
For as long as he could remember, words like secret and hidden and sequestered and mysterious and sub rosa had quietly thrilled him, no less now than when he’d been a boy.
On the wall opposite the hidden door by which he entered was an insulated steel door weighing eight hundred pounds. It could be opened either with a combination dial or the words Hola Nola Massa, an incantation used by dark magicians in the Middle Ages to ensure the success of their endeavors.
He spoke the words, and the door opened, and he went through into a small apartment at the moment unfurnished. The front room was twenty by thirty feet. Beyond it was a full bathroom that also provided a refrigerator and microwave.
The walls and ceiling were three-foot-thick, poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete covered with inch-thick sound board and then drywall. If he were to bring an iPod in here and play the most ear-splitting heavy-metal song at the highest possible volume, the crashing chords would sound like a distant, not-quite-identifiable noise on the other side of the eight-hundred-pound door, out there in the vestibule. Beyond that, it couldn’t be heard at all.
This was one of three panic rooms concealed at different points in the residence, to which he could retreat if terrorists or mere burglars invaded the house, and wait them out until police had dealt with them. The other two chambers were not as deeply placed or as thoroughly fortified as this one. None appeared on the records in the city’s building department.
Not until a few weeks after the completion of the house had he begun to understand that this particular panic room could serve in a different capacity from the other two. He needed an additional month before he could admit that subconsciously he had known to what alternate purpose this space could be put. It was conceived neither by the inner child who loved spooky old movies nor by the security-conscious billionaire that child had become. It was designed instead by a more ruthless aspect of his personality that he hadn’t been fully ready to acknowledge, a totally free and all-powerful version of Dorian Purcell, an Ultimate I that yearned to express itself.
Now he spoke two lines of verse that he’d heard once, that appealed to him for reasons he could not entirely explain. He did not know the poet or the rest of the poem, and he didn’t care to know.
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
The acoustics of the room were such that, though he didn’t whisper, the words seemed to die in the air before reaching the farther wall.
To cross over from this blighted age to the transhuman future and rise above the limitations of the human species, to become as a god, it was necessary to think like a god. And gods recognized no limitations.
He stood sipping chocolate-flavored vodka over ice, surveying the room, considering what age-appropriate decor might be the most appealing, imagining what ultimate power could here be his.
The challenge was daunting, to indulge in a secret life of forbidden pleasure in this sanctum sanctorum without allowing it either to dominate him or to change in any way the face or the personality that he presented to the world above.
Slowly a measured smile formed as he considered what fun he might have rising to this challenge, as he had risen to so many others with ever-escalating success.
111
Already, by 2:05 Thursday afternoon, Sheriff Hayden Eckman had talked himself into a good mood. Tio Barbizon was right: It was a relief to be owned, to have no responsibility except to do as he was told. When Barbizon’s men arrived at six o’clock to collect dead bodies and evidence, to have Hayden sign off on a concocted version of recent events that would satisfy the attorney general, then his new life could begin.