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you can't seem to swallow away. Violet haze blurred the air beyond the mica.
Genie Strange screamed.
Howard turned. The door to Genie's room was closed closed and latched. The
drapes around Strange and his activities bulged outward.
Genie hopped through and fell, dragging a section of the velvet down. The
scarf used to gag her had slipped out of her mouth; it was the only garment
she was wearing. Her wrists and ankles were tied together behind her back, but
she'd managed to undo the cord that'd bound her to the drain.
Robert Strange, his face as hard and contorted as that of a marble demon,
stepped out behind her. He grabbed a handful of Genie's black hair with his
free hand.
"Hey!" Howard said. There was a bank of equipment between him and the
Stranges. As gracefully as if he'd been practicing all his life, Howard took
two running steps, planted his right palm on the rack, and leaped over with
his legs swung off to his left side. Even the Thief of Baghdad would be
impressed
Until the caftan's billowing hem caught the chassis full of plug-in circuits
on top of the rack. As Howard's legs straightened, the tightening cloth
spilled him like a lassoed steer. Strange looked at him without expression.
Howard sprang up. The torn caftan, bunched now around his ankles, tripped him
again.
Strange lifted Genie's head, avoiding her attempts to bite him. He poised the
curved dagger in his right hand over her throat. Howard grabbed the sides of
the rug on which he'd fallen and jerked with all his strength, snatching
Strange's feet out from under him.
"You . . . !" shouted Strange as he toppled backward. Genie'd tossed her short
hair free of his grip, but he didn't lose the dagger in his other hand. It was
underneath when the Wizard of Fast Food hit the concrete.
The chassis that Howard'd dragged to the floor with him was popping and
spluttering, but he wasn't prepared for the flash of violet light that filled
the interior of the lab. It was so intense that Howard only vaguely noticed
the accompanying thunderclap. He heard Wally cry out and turned.
Wally wasn't there. His clothing, from brown shoes to the pair of reading
glasses he wore tilted up on his forehead, lay in the middle of the hexagram.
The hundred and twenty-three pounds of Wally Popple had vanished.
Except for an image in the mica window.
Howard lifted Genie before he remembered that her stepfather and the dagger
might be of more immediate concern. He looked back.
He'd been right the first time. Strange's face was turned toward Howard. He
looked absolutely furious.
He'd managed to thrash into a prone position while dying, but the silver hilt
projecting from the middle of his back showed that dying was certainly what
he'd done.
The transformer on the far left of the line shorted out. The one next to it
went a heartbeat later, and when the third failed it showered the room with
blobs of flaming tar. One of them slapped the mica window, and shattered it
like a bomb.
"Can you please untie me, Howard?" asked the girl in his arms. "Though the way
things are starting to happen in here, maybe that could wait till we're
outside."
"Right!" said Howard. "Right!"
He paused to shrug off what was left of the caftan; it had started to burn as
well. Somehow he couldn't get concerned about what the guards thought of him
now.
* * *
Because he and Genie were going to be gone for at least three weeks and a
fourth besides if the Chinese authorities agreed to open Tibet to
Strangeco which they would, Howard Jones wasn't called the
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Swashbuckler of Fast Food for nothing Howard stopped by the mansion's former
garage for a moment. He liked to, well, keep an eye on how things were going.
He'd had the big room cleaned and nearly emptied immediately after the
wedding, but he still smelled the bitterness of burned insulation. He supposed
it was mostly in his mind by now.
Genie'd wanted to tear the garage down completely since it held nothing but
bad memories for her, but she'd agreed to let Howard keep the room so long as
he'd had the door into her old suite welded shut.
She wasn't the sort of girl to object to the whim of the man who'd saved her
life; besides, she loved her husband.
Howard went to the skeletal apparatus on the one rack remaining in the room.
Three hair-fine filaments were still attached to the top edge of a piece of
mica no bigger than a quarter.
Howard bent to peer into it. If you looked carefully at the right times, you
could see images in the mica.
The focus wandered. Howard hadn't tried to adjust the apparatus himself or let [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]