The World Walker Series Box Set Read online

  The World Walker Series Box Set

  Ian W. Sainsbury

  Contents

  The World Walker

  The Unmaking Engine

  The Seventeenth Year

  The Unnamed Way

  Copyright © 2016 Ian W. Sainsbury

  All rights reserved.

  Visit the author’s blog at

  https://ianwsainsbury.com

  Cover by Hristo Kovatliev

  For Ruth

  1

  Los Angeles

  Present day

  It’s never a good day to die, whatever they tell you in the movies. Then again, scriptwriters are paid to deliver snappy, memorable dialogue, not universal truths.

  Legs dangling over the edge of the building, Seb Varden could still just about hear the last chorus of Forgotten Blues, as the band cranked up the volume six stories below. Clockwatchers—not too many years ago considered the biggest band in LA—still finished every gig with the same song, and Seb smiled picking out the snish of Dan's high-hat and thrack of the snare as he slowed the band into the final few seconds. Worked into a frenzy, the crowd screamed for more, despite knowing they'd never get it. Refusal to play an encore was a Clockwatchers trademark. Lead singer Meera had always had an instinct for stagecraft, and her notion of playing under a huge clock that counted down the band's time on stage had proved a winner from their first gig. The hands of the clock moved backward toward midnight, ignoring real-world time. The song they started before the hands met at the top of the dial was always their last. Seb leaned forward, listening more intently for the end of the ritual.

  "Watch the clock," came the familiar words, drifting up through dark, heavy, summer smog, "because the clock is watching you." Seb frowned. The words were right, but the voice saying them was unexpected.

  The metal fire-escape ladder rattled and the heady smell of marijuana smoke drifted across the rooftop.

  "Hey, Meera," said Seb, "not like you to miss the sign-off."

  Meera picked her way carefully across the rooftop, graceful as a dancer, despite permanently negotiating the world through the haze of a habitual dope smoker. She sat next to Seb and offered him the spliff. He shook his head, smiling.

  "Still on a health kick, huh?" she said, drawing deeply, the red glow brightening and revealing her dark eyes, just visible under heavy bangs and enough mascara to make a goth feel naked. They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Meera looked behind her across the Burbank rooftops out to the lights of LA; a glittering bauble dropped in the valley, blotting out the night sky with a million tiny stabs of light. She turned back to the dark mountains before them.

  "You're looking the wrong way, you know," she said.

  Seb carried on gazing toward the Verdugo Mountains. The bar was right on the edge of the city. The neon sign below announced "Badlands" to passing traffic, and the owner was only half-joking.

  "You sure?" he said. He couldn't hear anything other than the sounds of the dispersing crowd and the hum of a thousand cars, but he knew a couple hours’ walk would bring him to a place where the clearest sound would be the suss of the wind through the leaves and the creak of shifting wood as the trees stretched and groaned.

  Meera lit a new spliff from the end of the last one and inhaled deeply. She sighed melodramatically.

  "Go ahead," said Seb. "Ask me.” Meera absently brushed hair away from her eyes and looked at him.

  "What's really going on, Seb?" she asked. "If Scrappy or Dan suddenly said they'd decided to give up music and move to Europe I'd believe them, but you? Well, maybe not Scrappy. He still thinks Europe is an imaginary land from Lord Of The Rings. But Seb Varden, white soul boy, best songwriter on the west coast?"

  Seb snorted but Meera just raised an eyebrow. "Hey, what the hell do the critics know? And come on. Five minutes without access to a piano and you'll be climbing the walls."

  Seb sighed and flicked some of Meera's ash off his jeans.

  "It's just time for a change, Mee, is all," he said. "Nothing more to it than that."

  Meera took a long pull on the joint and said nothing for a while.

  Abruptly standing up, she ruffled Seb's hair fondly and started back across the rooftop.

  "You're full of shit, Sebbie,” she called. Seb grimaced. "And stop pulling faces," she continued without looking back at him. "Whatever it is you're really up too, it sure as hell ain't giving up music and moving to Italy or where the fuck ever."

  "You always did have a wonderful vocabulary, Mee," he said.

  "Yeah, and you always played your cards a bit too close to your chest, but hey, you've got my number, you could always use that phone-shaped object you carry around to actually call me," she said, the rungs of the fire-escape rattling as she made her way back down.

  Seb waited another thirty minutes or so, until he heard the band's van roaring off down the street. He stood up and turned back to the permanent glow of the city. There was so much he was going to miss. Meera was right, of course. He wasn't going to Italy. Or where the fuck ever.

  Two hours later and Seb was close to his favorite place in LA. Officially, the Verdugo Mountains weren't in LA at all, but Seb always thought of them that way. The steep, scrub-lined dirt paths, the tough vegetation that looked like it had taken hold before humanity had made its way out of the slime; the mountains were a reminder that the city was a cheap ornament Nature could brush away at any time. The mountains had a permanence and a silence that drew Seb in. Popular with hikers during the day, he had found the solitude he craved by walking the paths at night. The threat of mountain lions or coyotes discouraged most people from heading out after dark, but Seb found the local wildlife treated him with the same respect he gave them, keeping their distance.

  He shrugged the backpack off his shoulders and realized he had managed the entire hike without once thinking about what he was about to do and why. Now, finally reaching the spot he'd picked out weeks before, looking back at the city, he reviewed the last six months quickly and calmly.

  The initial headaches had been nothing unusual at first. His occasional willingness to experiment with drugs had led to some spectacular hangovers over the years. And he was thirty-two now, not nineteen. Hangovers wiped out entire days and no amount of water, fresh fruit and Tylenol seemed able to ease the process. It was when the headaches started manifesting on the days when he'd been nowhere near any substances that he thought something might be wrong. A suspiciously fast referral to a specialist by his doctor heightened his suspicions, and by the time the diagnosis came in, he was already preparing for bad news. As it turned out, the news couldn't have been worse.

  Certain impressions, however trivial under normal circumstances, stand out when someone tells you something that alters the course of your life. The specialist was attractive, Latin, intelligent and beautiful. Seb's urge to flirt had deserted him totally, but he found himself obsessively focusing on her nipple, clearly outlined beneath the medical white of her jacket. There was nothing sexual in his gaze, but he found himself unable to look away as he registered her words. Brain tumor. Inoperable. Less than a year. She had said a lot more that afternoon, covering his options. There would be loss of memory at first, some balance problems, weakness in the limbs. He might experience fits as the tumor grew and pressed on different parts of his brain.

  Seb sat down, his back against a tree, and opened the backpack. He pulled out a heavy glass tumbler and a bottle of Johnny Walker Premier. A few weeks back, he'd decided that if he was going to die, he was going to do it on his own terms, and after enjoying a few glasses of two-hundred dollar whisky. He poured an extremely generous measure and inhaled, taking in the caramel, honeyed woodiness, the almost
savory richness. There was a certain irony to the words that came into his mind just then: treat every moment as if it might be your last. He smiled to himself, raised his glass and toasted the night, drinking deeply and with unfeigned enjoyment.

  The specialist had been worth whatever money the insurance company had paid her. Within a few weeks, Seb had noticed some balance problems. He felt as tired when he woke up as if he had barely slept. Life became increasingly unreal - colors muted and washed out, food bland. Even his libido had packed its bags and left without a backward glance. Only the strongest tastes, such as a lovingly crafted Scotch, still gave him enjoyment. He'd only had one seizure, but it had been enough. Exactly seven days ago, sat in front of the love of his life—a nine-foot Bösendorfer grand piano—he suddenly lost all awareness of where he was and what was happening. He had been playing a chord sequence that had been plaguing his subconscious for weeks, threatening to turn into the chorus of new song. Suddenly, his entire existence seemed to tilt and shift, his vision narrowing rapidly to a pinprick. He woke minutes later, under the piano, his shoulder throbbing where it had hit the floor. Carefully picking himself up, Seb's first thought was to play, but the chord sequence had gone. Worse, he found he could no longer coordinate his hands on the keyboard. He caved, giving in to self-pity for the first and only time, lying face down on his bed and weeping. When he finally got up, he accepted the inevitable. The remainder of the week had been spent arranging the end of his life so that he wouldn't leave a mess for others to clear up.

  Seb took out his phone and cued up the last piece of music he ever expected to hear. When he’d started learning piano, it was the first thing he had ever managed to play all the way through - he remembered performing it in the children's home where he'd grown up. He selected the loop function and reached for his headphones. Not a fan of earbuds, Seb wanted total immersion when he listened, so his headphones had taken up much of the space in the backpack. Along with the Scotch. And the craft knife.

  He pulled out a piece of paper and unfolded it, putting it on the floor next to him, held in place with a stone. He knew Bob would be the one to discover his body. No one else walked their dogs at 5am every day, and the two of them had progressed over the years from wary looks to a nod of recognition, then finally some brief conversations and even a shared nip of the hard stuff from the flask Bob carried.

  Seb smoothed out the note and took another sip of Scotch. Taking out a Sharpie, he wrote,

  "Sorry it had to be you, Bob, but I knew you'd be able to cope ok. All the best, Seb."

  He recapped the pen before changing his mind and adding,

  "PS. Help yourself to the Scotch. It's good stuff."

  Finally sitting back, finishing his glass and taking the protective covering off of the razor-sharp blade, he pressed play. Bach's Prelude in C Major. Just a series of arpeggios, never repeating, so simple yet impossibly evocative of something half-remembered, half-seen. He'd never got bored of it, never stopped marveling at its ability to move him. And moved was exactly the right word, since he never finished listening to it in the same place as he'd started. It was the Glenn Gould version. The guy might grunt a bit while he played, but, man, no one played Bach like Glenn Gould did.

  Seb took the knife in his left hand and unhesitatingly drew a deep gash across his right wrist before changing hands and doing the same to his left. He wondered if he should feel grief, bitterness, anger, maybe even anticipation or happiness. But he felt none of these. He just felt resigned to the anonymous inevitability of fate as he sat back and let his blood seep into the dry dusty earth of the mountains.

  At 3:13am, he opened his eyes sleepily. A mountain lion stood about ten paces away, watching him. Seb raised his head, thinking for a moment that he was hallucinating. Realizing he wasn't, he called out to it, his voice sounding far away and disconnected.

  "Shoo!"

  The mountain lion cocked her head to one side, considering whether this was a fight she wanted to take on, before abruptly padding away into the darkness.

  At 3:49am, Seb opened his eyes again, much more slowly this time. His brain felt like it was trying to communicate with his body from the bottom of a dark, wet well. He struggled to focus, but when he managed it, he knew he was hallucinating. A huge thin figure stood in front of him. A huge thin glowing figure who looked exactly like the guy who stepped out of the spaceship at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  "Welcome to Earth," said Seb. "I would get up, but,” He lapsed into a bout of weak coughing, his breathing shallow and rasping. Man, it was getting hard to breathe. Seb decided it was time to stop making the effort. His hallucination would just have to get along without him. The hallucination, however, had other ideas.

  2

  The facility had originally been built during the Second World War, as part of a national strategy to provide the United States Government with a series of well-equipped underground bolt holes from which they could continue to govern in the event of a nuclear strike. It was an expensive strategy, involving the construction of thirty-seven such buildings across the country, and the irony wasn't lost on President Truman that if they hadn't invented the damn bomb in the first place, they could have saved millions of dollars. Still, throughout the Cold War, many workers in the higher echelons of public office took comfort in the fact they were rarely more than an hour away from a safe haven.

  Like most ultra-secret facilities, the Los Angeles DF1 Suites (named after DefCon 1, the state of emergency which would automatically trigger their use) were hidden in plain sight. In the State Department's experience, huge fences, barriers, heavily armed guards and warning signs kept out all but the most curious; but it was the most curious who were crucial to keep out. So the government had started placing its most important facilities near to more prominent, traditionally guarded ones. Then they'd come up with cover stories to deflect the curious. LA's DF1 Suites had a better cover story than many. Sitting on top of a vast warren of underground rooms was a long, low building displaying a simple sign: FMR. There was a fence, of course, and a guard—usually a retired cop catching up on the sports pages or taking a nap—but no one ever came near the place because of the smell. The guard was well paid due to the stench, which was pumped out to the surrounding countryside day and night. FMR stood for Fecal Matter Research. The locals all knew it as the Shit Station.

  For over fifty years, the secret rooms beneath the Shit Station had housed a single occupant. This occupant was watched—initially—by a twelve-person team of scientists plus nearly fifty highly trained guards, all unaware they were embarking upon the most tedious job they'd ever draw a pay check from. The guards lost interest within weeks and, over a period of decades, their numbers fell as budgets were cut. The professional fascination of the scientists took years to begin to diminish, but eventually, even they reluctantly accepted the inevitable. By the time Seb took his final stroll just over a mile away, the Shit Station only got one scientific visit a month and that was purely a box-ticking exercise.

  The occupant had arrived on US soil at Roswell, New Mexico on July 7th, 1947. He (although it had no discernible gender, 1950s American attitudes pretty much dictated the masculine epithet) had unceremoniously created a five-hundred feet wide crater in a thinly populated area, scared a few farmers and provided the raw material for decades of conspiracy theories. He had even been named: Billy Joe. This was in honor of the half-drunk old guy who'd come "for a look-see" about an hour after impact. The military response had been swift, a cordon was in place, but no one could prevent him seeing the figure standing in the wreckage. The old man had taken one look at the giant gray creature, spat on the dirt and stumped away, calling back over his shoulder, "Only came up to see Billy Joe, and that sure as hell ain't him." One of the soldiers raised his weapon as the drunk walked away, but an officer put his hand on the barrel and pushed it toward the ground.

  "Let him tell his story, son," he said. "Couldn't wish for a better witness."

 
A thousand accounts of what had occurred that night sprang up in the years following the incident. The story got some attention at first based on the evidence of a number of reliable witnesses who had seen lights in the sky or heard the shriek of tearing metal as something big tore into the New Mexico desert. But the lack of any material evidence ensured the story was never given much scrutiny. If something had crashed, where was the wreckage? Even if the US government had somehow pulled off the fastest, most thorough cleanup operation in modern history, some fragment would have remained, some tiny piece overlooked. But nothing ever came to light, and years of alien-hunters with magnifying glasses, metal detectors, and increasingly complex technological equipment had failed to turn up any evidence.

  The platoon of soldiers first on the scene were the only witnesses to the truth, and their exceptionally generous pension packets, coupled with some not-so-thinly-veiled threats, ensured they would never break their silence. But not a man among them would ever forget what they had seen. Colonel Harkett's statement from that night was still on file at the Shit Station and every scientist who had subsequently spent any time with Billy Joe had read and reread it so many times, they could have quoted it verbatim in their sleep.

  "The alien stood in the middle of the wreckage, looking around itself. And glowing. It didn't seem to see us, or, if it did, it sure as hell didn't care. The wreckage spread out a fair distance, around five-hundred feet in diameter. You could feel the heat, but there was no fire. You ever seen a plane crash? Looked like that in some ways, the way the wreckage was dispersed, the gouge in the ground made by the impact. But I couldn't stop thinking, where are the seats? This guy's come from another planet, right? You telling me it stood up for the whole trip? Couldn’t see any controls, neither. Every bit of wreckage looked the same, like it was the hull or something. Just plain metal. After a while, the alien closed its eyes and knelt down, putting its hands flat on the ground. That's when it happened, and Christ, I don't mind telling you I'm just glad you got other witnesses, 'cause I wouldn't believe it otherwise, in your shoes. Its whole body was glowing - did I mention that? It seemed to get brighter and for a second I just looked at it. Not an everyday sight, right? Then one of my men shouted and I looked back at the nearest piece of wreckage to me. It was getting smaller. I could see it happening. Now I've heard a couple of the guys say it sank into the ground but that isn't right. I know exactly what it reminded me of. You ever poured hot water on an ice cube? That's exactly how this looked. Like someone was picking it apart in tiny pieces. Then it was gone. All of it. And your gray fella was stretched out on the ground. Not glowing any more. We all figured it was dead."