Chapter #43The Technician by: imaj   You wake up.
You think you wake up. It’s impossible to tell, your surrounding are entirely dark and you cannot see a thing. Your other senses feed you details: A low constant buzzing sound is on the edge of your hearing. The floor feels cold and hard and you have cricks in your neck and back. You can smell nothing but your own stale sweat.
Time passes, impossible to measure. You have nothing but your own thoughts for company and they make for dull companions. You’ve really fucked this up. How are you going to get out? Patterson is going to be pissed. They circle through your head until you close your eyes – again, you think you close your eyes, but how can you tell – and try to sleep again.
*****
The door to the room cracks open with a hiss and light floods in. You draw your knees to your chest and try to shield your eyes with a rags clad arm. They seem to be all that remains of Monique’s clothes.
Two figures enter, little more than shapes outlined against the door. They say nothing, giving you a chance to acclimatise to the sudden brightness. It take maybe a minute or so, but eventually you are able to withdraw your arm and focus on the two in front of you.
The first is Curt Strassler, now dressed in a sharp business suit. He doesn’t really look at you, but instead fixes on a spot just above your head. You don’t recognise the other man though, a fat Asian clad in clad in cheap jeans and a ratty tee that pronounces ‘Han shot first’. They make for an odder pair, and odder still is that the Asian seems to recognise you.
“You come to my shop sometimes, don’t you,” he asks, suddenly grinning. “Hang out with Christian and his friends sometimes.” He cocks his head quizzically. “Don’t tell me, I’ll get it.” He chews on his lip thoughtfully. “Ah, I can’t. You know me though, don’t you?” You don’t reply, partially because you can’t remember who this man is, but mostly because the sheer oddity of the situation has left you speechless. “Eric,” he says, sounding a little hurt now. “From King Kong Comics?”
You do know the shop: a dilapidated little comic and gaming place in Saratoga Falls, and now that you remember that, you remember Eric as well – the hopeless proprietor that wants to be friends with his customers. You went a lot when you were younger, less so as you reached your senior year. Eric always left you wondering how he could stay in business.
He keeps looking at you expectantly. You guess he wants your name now. “Will,” you say huskily through dry lips. “Will Prescott.”
“That’s it,” grins Eric. To your surprise he stretches out his hand towards you. You grasp it numbly and he shakes your hand vigorously. He grins a bit more before finally letting you go, leaving you to blink in stupefaction. “Curt,” he says cheerfully, turning back to Straussler Senior and holding out his hand.
Curt Straussler passes something to Eric. The flash of silvery metal as it changes hands makes it instantly identifiable: It’s a mask. Eric makes a show of examining it though. The glow it gives off pools on his features, somehow making them more sinister.
“Monique, huh,” he says, grinning at you.
“He looked just like her,” scowls Curt, intent on making his unhappiness clear. It leaves you wondering just what the relationship between these two is that Eric can be so cheeky with Curt. “Sounded just like her. Knew everything she did. If he hadn’t slipped up about driving…” Curt tails of and glowers at you again. “He had a mask of my son in her purse. My son Kim!”
Eric Kim’s eyes flicker in Curt’s direction, but he says nothing. Instead he fixes them back on you. “So tell me Will,” he asks, still sounding friendly. “How does this work.”
You say nothing.
“It’s not one of your Fane toys is it,” Curt interrupts demandingly. “Like the… uh…”
“Like the dissuo,” laughs Eric. “No, not at all. I’m surprised the dissuo even worked on something like this,” he continues, lifting the mask up to indicate it. “No, this looks something special. I’m pretty sure this isn’t one of ours at all. I have to wonder where you got it Will.” He cocks his head to the side quizzically again. “Cat got your tongue.” Still you say nothing. “The real question though,” he continues, all trace of bonhomie disappearing from his voice suddenly. “The real question is, if you were pretending to be Monique who was pretending to be you?”
You look down at the floor, unwilling to say a thing. “Get him some clothes Curt,” you hear Eric saying.
However impossible it seems, your situation has gotten worse…
*****
Your new prison has lights at least, that’s the only point you can say in its favour.
It was an uncomfortable ride over. Curt returned to the little room that you had been locked up in with a pair of jeans and a shirt. They were too big for you, and you suspect they might have belonged to Jon, but you were grateful at least for the chance to finally cover up. Curt had also returned with a pair of heavy set goons, bigger and wider than himself. They’d watched you impassively through dark glasses, their faces betraying nothing.
They’d taken you by the arms once you’d dressed, one on each side of you with a massive slab of a hand gripping your upper arm. You’d almost yelped in pain at the tightness of the grip. They hadn’t relented, not whilst they had you pinned between them in the back of Curt Straussler’s BMW, not whilst they had dragged you in through the back door of King Kong Comics.
When you were younger, you’d have given anything to get in the stockroom there. You’d always supposed it was full of rare comic editions and special splatbooks that you hadn’t seen – a treasure trove for your younger and geekish self. It turned out to be a room full of dusty cardboard boxes.
Eric had pushed a bunch of them aside to reveal a hidden door set into one wall. “Essentials,” he had told you. “No one wants to buy that shit.” Then you had been pushed inside the room.
Your new prison has lights, it’s true, but that just means you can see inside it. Every surface, the floor, the walls and the roof are sheaved in metal. You don’t understand why, but the reddish brown stains that gather at the cracks between the plates hint at horrors you do not want to learn about. More obvious are the electrodes that hang loosely from an odd looking machine in one corner. You definitely don’t want to know about that.
The door to the room opens again and a slim figure is pushed in by one of Straussler’s goons. It’s you, Will Prescott, or rather the golem left in your place by Patterson. “Whoa, dude,” he exclaims as he sees you.
Eric follows in behind him, with Straussler’s goon squad taking up position on either side of him. “I take it you two know each other,” he says, grinning again. That friendliness is back again, but now you’ve seen this room you believe it is entirely faked. He snaps his fingers as the two goons withdraw “Let’s have a little fun,” he says with an evil looking grin as they leave him alone with you. You glance at those electrodes again, suddenly aware that the goons are, if anything, less dangerous than Eric.
However, a bell rings in the distance, from the front of the shop. “Fuck,” he says sourly. “I’ll be right back. You two…” He hesitates for a moment. “You two get your stories straight. It’ll be more fun tearing them apart that way.” His last grin is the most unpleasant of all.
Then you are alone in the cell with your doppelganger. It eyes you awkwardly. The golem is under Patterson’s control, you remember. You doubt it will help you here.
 You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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