Chapter 35: The Chair That Listens

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which a lie is a harmless little thing, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry into a very large office. What grows heavier with every untrue word you say, and lighter with every true one, and has been strapped to your back since the first time you hid a biscuit? Do not say a chain. This Chapter has plenty of those, and none of them is the answer.

It turns out that a chain is only a small amount of metal, until there are enough of them.

The first set had been bearable. It held his wrists, his ribs and his chest, and it squeezed the way a very firm hug squeezes: tight, cold and thorough, so that it was hard to take a full breath. Arthur drew half of one and decided this was a problem he could think around.

"Why did you help Miss Lotus?" said Mr. Vale.

"I was bored."

The chair gave a quiet, satisfied click.

A second set of chains poured out of the air and wound around his legs.

"Please try again."

"She owed me a favor."

Click. Another set. It looped around his shoulders, and his arms went numb to the elbows.

"Mr. Specter."

"I tripped over her. It was an accident."

Click, click, click.

The links came faster now, and thicker, in loops and coils and whole bright ropes, until Arthur could not tell where the chair ended and he began. They were cold, and then cold was not the word. They sank into his ribs. They bit into his wrists. Spots swam at the edges of the big glittering room, and the city beyond the windows wobbled like something seen from underwater.

Nobody moved. That was the part he would remember afterward. Mr. Vale stood with his hands folded. Mr. Lotus sat behind the long desk with his eyes on the armrests. By the door, Igred stared at the carpet, and a muscle jumped in his bearded jaw, once, and was still.

They were not enjoying it. That made it worse.

"It is called a Witness Chair," said Mr. Lotus.

His voice had not warmed at all. It was the same flat voice with its coat on, and it reached Arthur as if from the far end of a tunnel.

"It is very old. It was built for a court that no longer exists. It does not read minds, Mr. Specter, and it does not care what you say. It cares only what you believe." He folded his hands. "Every lie you tell it adds a chain. Every truth takes one away. You have told it, by Mr. Vale’s count, nineteen lies."

"Twenty," said Mr. Vale, mildly.

"Twenty. I would stop, if I were you. It becomes difficult to breathe."

Every truth takes one away. It was a very simple rule, if you were not strapped to it.

"The truth will set you free," said Mr. Lotus. "That is all we are offering. One honest answer, and it lets go of you. We can do this peacefully."

Peacefully.

The word went into Arthur and did not come out again.

He looked at the carpet, because it was the only thing in the room that was not looking at him. It was very thick, and it had been vacuumed in stripes. Somebody had been paid to make those stripes. Somewhere across the same city, a phone lay in a pocket, or a drawer, or on a pillow, ringing and ringing and not being picked up.

He could hear it. That was the odd part. Under the click of the chains and the slow thud of his own heart, he could hear it ring, thin and patient, nine times, ten, eleven, and then the small silence that always came afterward.

His chin began to shake. He told it to stop. It did not listen to him either.

The truth was right there. It sat behind his teeth like a swallowed coin, small and warm and worn smooth from a week of being turned over, and it would have taken one breath to spend it. Then the chains would open, and the thin man would write it down, and it would go into a file, thin and gray, in a drawer, to be read aloud by strangers.

He shut his mouth on it.

A tear ran down the side of his nose. He tried to wipe it on his shoulder, and the chain across his shoulder said no, and so it ran on into the corner of his mouth. It tasted of salt, and a little of metal. His lungs worked in small sips. His fingers, the only part of him still free, opened and closed on the leather of the armrest, around nothing at all.

Then something in his chest let go. It was not a crack. It was quieter than that, like snow sliding off a roof, and what came out of him was a laugh.

It was an ugly, cracked, astonished sound, and it hurt like a cough in a broken rib. He could not stop it. He laughed until his eyes streamed, until Mr. Vale’s pale eyes narrowed and Igred looked up.

"You made it so complicated," he gasped. "You built a magic chair. You have a man whose whole job is to ask me questions. You put me in a room with a view, and you said please sit, and now you’re talking about peace." He lifted his head as far as the chains allowed. "No. I refuse your peace."

He had not planned to say it. He had only meant it, all the way down.

The chair stopped.

For a moment, there was no sound at all in the great carpeted room. Then the chains began to shine. The links lit from inside, turning from dull metal to pure white, and each one opened like a flower and showed a letter. They were not only chains anymore. They were words, running along every loop and coil in a hundred glowing pieces, and he could read what they said.

I REFUSE YOUR PEACE.

I REFUSE YOUR PEACE.

I REFUSE YOUR PEACE.

It was the one thing he had said all evening that the chair believed.

A single chain loosened from his chest, because a truth takes one away, and fell around his feet like snow, and went out. The rest stayed where they were. They had not been built to let anyone go for a refusal. They glowed on, bright and steady and utterly unmoved, like a row of lanterns on a locked gate.

The truth can be a weight or a key; it depends on who is holding the lock for free.

Mr. Lotus’s mouth opened a little. Mr. Vale’s eyes slid, very slowly, from the glowing chains to the boy.

Arthur drew a breath. It was a little deeper than the last one, and it hurt, but it hurt cleanly, the way a window hurts when you open it a crack. One chain was not freedom. It was only room to think.

Now, he thought.

He did not have a plan. He had half of one, which was all anyone ever had. He had a body that ached all over, a chair that had just admitted he was telling the truth and still would not let him go, and two men in the room who were looking at him, for the first time, with something other than patience.

Fine. Keep the body.

He called.

It felt like pulling a thread from the back of his skull: a warm tug, a cold flash, and then the air beside the chair folded open like a sheet of paper. A boy stepped out of the fold, with his face, his clothes and his half-smile, and a speck of dust on one knee. The clone looked at Mr. Vale. Mr. Vale looked back.

"Go," said Arthur.

The clone went.

It crossed the carpet in three long strides and leapt, arms out, straight at the thin man’s throat. For one bright second, it was possible to believe it would work.

Mr. Vale lifted two fingers and tapped it on the forehead.

That was all. The clone stopped in mid-air, as if it had been unplugged, and then came apart as softly as smoke, in a long gray curl that dissolved before it reached the floor.

"Oh, do stop with the drama," said Mr. Vale, with a faint smirk, and brushed his fingers together. "And simply answer the question."

He turned back to the chair.

He had meant to say something else. It was on his face. But the words dried up, because Arthur, who had been straining against the chains a moment ago with white knuckles and burning eyes, had gone slack in the leather with his head tipped to one side, and there was nothing in his face at all. His eyes were open. They were pointed at Mr. Vale. They were not looking at anything. It was like a house with every light on and nobody home.

"What on earth," said Mr. Vale.

It lasted one second. It was all the second Arthur needed.

Arthur had left.

He had stepped out of his own body the way a person steps out of a coat, and it was very strange, even now, to look back at it. There it sat, slack and blank in the chair, still wrapped in its glowing chains, with the Passive running it like a patient clerk: Sit. Look bored. Do nothing. The chains had no hold on a ghost. They had been built for something with a body, and he had left them the only thing they could keep.

He went. He went fast, faster than he could have moved in his own body, with the lightness that only anger can give. He shot across the carpet like a draft, without a sound, and ducked behind the long leather couch by the wall.

Mr. Vale’s head turned. His pale eyes passed over the couch and, for one terrible heartbeat, stopped on it.

Then they went back to the empty-eyed boy in the chair.

He’s busy, thought Arthur. Good.

Behind the couch, low on the wall, was a metal grille. It was the kind built to carry warm air through a building like this, plain and flat, and it was held on by two spring clips, the cheap kind that keep a panel shut until somebody presses them in exactly the right place.

Arthur could not walk through a wall. He could not lift so much as a pencil. A ghost’s hands are barely hands. But a clip like that does not need lifting. It needs one small push in the right spot, and a push was something he could manage.

He put a fingertip to the first clip and pressed. Nothing happened. He tried a little to the left, and nothing happened again. His fingers shook. From the far side of the couch came the voice of Mr. Lotus, saying, "Get him out of that thing," and the scrape of a shoe, and the grunt of a man heaving at something that would not move.

Come on.

He found it, a tiny dent in the metal, hardly bigger than a grain of rice. He leaned on it with everything a ghost has, which is mostly stubbornness, and the clip let go with a small, dry snap.

The second one went more easily, now that he knew where to press. The grille tipped forward, and Arthur slid into the dark behind it.

The air shaft ran straight and narrow for a very long way, with the smell of warm dust. He crept along it on his stomach, though he did not need to, for no better reason than that it felt less likely to be heard. Behind him, the office dwindled to a bright square. Beyond it, in the faint, tinny murmur of a room he could no longer see, Mr. Vale said, very quietly, "Fetch a physician."

My body.

He was angry. It was a clean, cold, tidy anger that sat in him like a stone. They had chained him to a chair. They had made him lie, and then they had made him pay for it. They had looked at him and seen nothing but a puzzle with a missing piece, and they had asked him for the piece, and not once had they asked if it hurt.

But he was also, he found, thinking very clearly.

He could not walk back into that room and take his body. He had no way of fighting two Awakened men on his own, and no hope, in the shape he was in, of getting past a legendary driver. Whatever he did, he needed them to leave. He needed them looking somewhere else.

At the end of the shaft, a second grille let in a stripe of yellow light. It was held by the same kind of clip. He found the notch at once and pressed, and the grille dropped onto the polished floor of a quiet corridor with a clatter that nobody was near enough to hear. The first door he tried opened onto a kitchen.

It was an executive kitchen, the kind that exists to make a very expensive lunch. It had a steel range the size of a small car, copper pots hanging from a rail, and a wall of gleaming knives. A pair of white aprons hung by the door. It was entirely, perfectly empty.

Good, thought Arthur, and then, because he was not a monster, he checked the pantry, and the cold room, and the dish station, twice.

Then he went to the middle of the kitchen, and called.

The clone stepped out of the fold of the air with its dusty knee and its half-smile, and Arthur slid into it like a hand into a glove.

It felt like coming home to a cold house. The body was lighter than his own, and slightly wrong, like a borrowed coat that fits across the shoulders but not at the wrists. But it had hands. It had thumbs. And a pair of thumbs, in a kitchen, can do almost anything.

He went down the range, one burner at a time, and turned every knob as far as it would go. A soft, rising hiss filled the room. He opened the oven. He opened the second oven. He found the main valve behind the pots, a big red wheel on a steel pipe, and spun it open with both hands, and the hiss became a low, steady roar.

There was a drawer of long kitchen matches by the stove. He took one.

He walked backward down the length of the kitchen, with the box in his fist and the smell of gas thickening around him. He reached the service door at the far end. He looked back at the empty room, at the copper pots, at the lovely, terrible hiss.

It’s just a kitchen, he told himself. Nobody’s in it. It’s just a kitchen.

He struck the match, and threw it.

The sound arrived a half second after the light.

It was not a very large explosion, as these things go. It was a bright, flat, tremendous whump, like a giant punching a pillow, and it blew the doors off both ovens and every pot from its hook. Fire rolled across the ceiling in a long orange wave. Overhead, an alarm started to scream, and a moment later every sprinkler in the room turned on.

Arthur ducked through the service door and slammed it behind him. Then he ran.

In the great carpeted office, nobody had been looking at the couch.

They had been looking at Arthur, or what was left of him. Mr. Vale had tried to haul the boy out of the chair, and found that the chains held him as if they had been welded, and had settled for two fingers on his wrist. Mr. Lotus had come around the desk with the pale, startled face of a man who has seen a trick he cannot explain. "He’s breathing," Mr. Vale had said. "But there is nobody inside. It’s as if..." And then he had stopped, because the whole floor had gone whump beneath his feet.

"What was that?" said Mr. Lotus.

"The kitchen," said Igred, already at the door. His calm face had gone very still. "That was the executive kitchen."

For a heartbeat, none of them moved. A man has to choose between the thing in front of him and the thing that is on fire.

"Go," said Mr. Vale, sharply. "All of you. I will stay with the b—"

"Nobody is staying," said Mr. Lotus. "That is my floor."

They went. All three of them, out through the tall doors and down the long hall at a run, in the sudden flicker of the emergency lights. The doors swung shut behind them, and the office was quiet.

Quiet, except for a small, soft sound from the back wall, where a bookcase, which was not really a bookcase, swung open on a hinge.

The clone came out of the service passage soaking wet, with its face smudged and its half-smile gone. It was carrying something. It had found the thing on the way, hanging on the wall by the pantry, behind a glass door marked EMERGENCY. It was long and red and heavy, with a flat blade on one end. It might have been a fire axe. It might have been an extremely ambitious cleaver. Arthur did not stop to check.

He crossed the carpet in six strides to the middle of the floor, where the chair still stood on its own, patient and clean, with the boy slumped in it and the glowing chains wound tight around him. He did not aim at the boy. He aimed low, at the iron feet, where the gray lines began.

He swung.

The blade bit into the left foot, and the chair made a sound that no chair ought to make, a long, shivering, glassy crack, like a frozen pond. White light ran up along the seam. He swung again, and the other foot split. A third time, and the whole thing folded in on itself in a heap of dark metal and old leather, and every last chain went out like a blown candle.

The clone’s hands went to pieces on the axe handle, and then the rest of it followed, as soft as smoke.

Arthur opened his eyes on the carpet.

He had slid back in without noticing. His real body had tumbled out of the wreck and lay where it fell, blank-eyed and waiting, and it was a huge relief to be inside it again. The ache hit him all at once: his ribs, his wrists, his lungs, every bruise the chains had made, arriving in a single wave. He sat up too fast. The room swung. He caught the edge of the desk and hauled himself to his feet.

Move. He had perhaps a minute.

There was a pink form crumpled in his back pocket. It had been there since Ms. Holloway handed it to him, and it was a good deal more wrinkled than when she had given it. FORM 11-B. MEETING REQUEST. He smoothed it on the desk. He had a pen. He looked at the box marked REASON FOR MEETING, and then he turned the form over and wrote on the back, in a steady, angry hand.

He had never filled out a form more sincerely in his life.

He propped it on the broken chair, where it could not be missed. Then he walked to the tall doors, put his shoulder against them, and went out into the flashing red light and the alarms, the cold gray rain of the sprinklers, and the hundreds of soaked, shouting people already pouring down the stairs. Nobody looked twice at one wet boy among so many wet adults.

He was in the lobby before anyone came back to the office.

Mr. Lotus came back first.

He walked in slowly, his good gray suit dripping, with a smear of soot across one cheek. He stopped in the middle of the carpet.

The chair was gone. In its place lay a wreck of metal and leather, split from top to bottom, with a thin trail of smoke still curling from one arm. On top of it, set carefully upright, as if someone had been very sure it would be found, sat a sheet of pink paper.

He crossed the room. He picked it up.

It was Form 11-B. He turned it over. On the back, in small, furious, perfectly legible handwriting, were three lines.

Hadjer is the only thing standing between your swamp of a kingdom and my fire.

Remember that.

She won’t be there forever.

For a long moment, Mr. Lotus stood quite still, with the rain from his jacket dripping slowly onto the thick, quiet carpet.

He read it a second time. And then a third.

It was a strange thing to see. The flat, polite voice that had been sitting on his face all evening, the one with its coat buttoned to the neck, seemed to slide off all at once. Underneath it was nothing at all, only a tired grown man holding a piece of paper and, for the first time that anyone in that building could remember, not smiling.

TO BE CONTINUED...