NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
We are in an underground room. Hard to say how big, as it is full of IT equipment in rows of racks, like wired and winking library stacks. The ceiling seems low. The air-conditioning is brisk.
“Sir, this way please.”
The voice comes out of the cold air.
“This way? Which way is that?
“Hurry up!”
“Have you seen a white rabbit down here?”
I look around for a person, or speakers, also for a camera, but see nothing.
“Don’t look for me, look down.”
Looking down, on command, and I see a row of dot-like amber diodes in the floor lighting up in sequence and suggesting a direction to the right. New ones come on ahead as I followed them. The floor is zinc color with countless tiny holes in it like the bottom of a fine sieve.
Diddlie’s white rabbit, Mr. Liddell, ran off again this morning as she was changing the straw in his hutch. She called me asking for help but I was out in the garden. So she ran down the hill and found me, complaining that I didn’t carry my phone. She wouldn’t stop to regain her breath. She waved a string bag in the air and insisted we go looking for him immediately. We started searching in the field of golden rod up by The Ashes where he was found once before. Then Diddlie and I lost track of each other. I went looking in the garage. She explored the weeds calling out to him. Now I am following lighted diodes like bread crumbs dropped in the woods.
I can see someone, way down the aisle between the shelves of servers, by an orange metal door. Waiting for me, in black t-shirt and grey cargo pants. He carries his phone in one hand and his side arm is holstered in black fabric on his belt. He says nothing and opens the door.
“Have you seen Diddlie’s rabbit, Mr, Liddell?”
“No.”
“I chased him down under the car and he disappeared in the grease pit.”
“They would have caught him on the monitors just like they caught you.”
“What monitors?”
“You shouldn’t be down here.”
He guides me through the orange doorway and then I remember seeing this guy before. He used to sit at the site of Derwent Sloot’s old house while they built that huge new Macmansion. We climb three flights of concrete steps in a narrow stairwell. Now I notice LEDs in the steps too, but they are not lighting up. There is a flat screen built into the wall at each landing, which emits light but has no picture. They look like windows on to a brilliant void. At the top-most landing, two flat screens face each other on opposite walls of unfinished poured concrete. Each displays a picture of a gilded mirror and they reflect each other into a mirrored infinity. I think there’s a small Dordrecht’s logo in the bottom right corner, but it is so faint I am not sure. These mirrors look the same as those I saw years ago in Jake’s foyer. He pulls down an attic ladder, set into a high concrete ceiling, with a length of dirty white clothes line attached and hanging down about chest high with a knot in the end.
“That seems rather low tech!”
“It does the job.”
“Where’s Diddlie?”
“Who?”
‘Did she find Mr. Liddell?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, she is looking.”
“Go ahead.”
Looking up I can see an old brown Bakelite household light fixture, in the plaster ceiling of the room at the top of the ladder. I climb up the first four or five steps and pause. The floor above is now at eye level. I can see small grey dust ball on a parquet floor, and a dead fly’s thorax hangs in a cobweb stretched between the floor and the chipped white kick board. There are tiny spots on the floor, perhaps droppings from undisturbed spiders. I hear something like claws running on the wooden floor, but it’s too late to see anything.
“Keep going!”
I climb on, and cough. There’s a lot of dust in the air. I step off the top of the ladder into the narrow hallway of a house. There’s an open door to my left admitting daylight from an old sash window with faded green drapes, shredded at the bottom, by cats perhaps. The walls of the small room are a light brown nicotine color and the smell is unmistakable. A single bed sags under the window with a faded scarlet eiderdown stretched from the bottom up to and over a flattened pillow at the head and reaching down to the floor. I pull up the bottom of the eiderdown at the middle of the bed and look for Mr. Liddell. He runs out at the head of the bed and down the hall. A thread hanging down from a raised corner of the eiderdown catches on his ear. He takes it with him and the attached cobwebs too. He is much too fast for me. Stan is now standing in the hall closing the hatch with a handle let into the top. It has a small parquet covered lid which blends perfectly into the floor of the hall, as does the hatch after it is closed. The fit in the old floor is precise. I can barely see the outline of the hatch in the irregular pattern of small gaps between the worn parquets.
“That never happened.” He steps away from me.
“What do you mean? You must have seen that rabbit as well as I did.”
“There’s no rabbits in here.”
Stan walks down the hall and comes back with a dirty corn stalk broom. He taps the floor with it as if stenciling. Instead of ink he spreads house dust. Then he sweeps carefully over the top of the hatch in circular motions to spread the load from the broom into all the cracks, and leaves the excess dust lying around. Now the hatch’s outline is concealed.
Stan points down the hall.
“Go that way.”
“Yeah, alright. Are you coming?”
“I’ll be a while.”
I walk down the hall and find Diddlie sitting in the kitchen trimming stems of goldenrod to fit into different size vases. Two big earthenware ones are on the floor at her feet, other smaller glass and some white porcelain reflect the yellow blooms all over the table.
“Did you find him?”
“Yeah, I caught him just now, see.”
She has put Mr. Liddell in the string bag and tied it to a chair leg. He has settled down with his eyes closed and ears held down by the string squares of the bag.
“He’s going to chew his way out of that you know.”
“No way, it’s made of fishing line or something indestructible.
“Isn’t this a great crop, Fred!”
“This isn’t your kitchen.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“Can’t you see, I am preparing these flowers for display.”
“It is too early for goldenrod you know….Why, haven’t you been looking for Mr. Liddell?”
“Well, for one thing he is right here, and for another I had to harvest these early flowers some time, and thought I might find him in among them.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Have a seat honey.”
“I call this my harvest house, because I always do my flower arranging here, ever since I found that really good stuff.”
“Is it Rank’s house?”
“No.”
“I don’t get it. How did he get from the grease pit to this room?”
“How should I know? I saw him run out of the back of the garage though. He escaped through that gap in the boards. So I figured he would come in the house. He likes it better than my place.”
“Well, I was looking for him in the garage. I saw Rank in there, as he stepped down into the old grease pit to work on a car.”
“Oh, he’s always working on that old thing, and you know what?I have never seen it run. I don’t think he can even start it.”
“Well, where did Rank go?”
“Did he start it?”
“No, he dropped something though, and it seemed to bounce down into somewhere way below him in the pit, and he went after it. Maybe he didn’t know I was there. I said hello, but no one answered. Then I saw Mr. Liddell looking at me from under the car, right at the top of the steps down into the pit. That’s when I went after him and Rank.”
Diddlie puts her scissors down. She bends to tickle Mr. Liddell’s ears. Then reaches into a big pile of golden rod on a threadbare blue tarp spread on the floor, and puts more blooms on the table.
“So what’s down there?”
“A big server farm. What is it for? I mean I was amazed. Who’s is it? Some company’s installation or what?”
“Oh so that’s where it is!”
“What Diddlie?”
“It’s dead people’s data.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when you die all your data lives on after you, down in there.”
“Oh you mean there’s a cloud down there.”
“Yeah, but an underground cloud, like for the dead you see.”
“A data ossuary?”
“No, that’s for bones!”
“Is that what he told you? Dead people’s data lives on?”
“I figured it out for myself. I mean it’s obvious when you think about it!”
“I don’t follow you Diddlie.”
“Well, Lou once told me that old data are valuable and that it is all being salvaged.”
“Did he explain who is doing it?”
“No but he said some of it is going on around here.”
“He never told me that.”
“You know Rank is weird too. He once asked if I have a vacuum cleaner. Then he took the bag out, which was nearly full and put a new one in from my cupboard; but he didn’t throw the old one away. He said he needed it!”
“What house are we in now?”
“The Ashes of course.”
“This place isn’t as ruined as it looks.”
“No, some of the rooms are okay. There’s no water in the faucets though.
“I wonder if that old Ford Torino is still in the garage here.”
“Well, I don’t know what kind of car it is, but it is there.”
I can see people and a black SUV outside the dirty kitchen window through the space where the blind has broken. They are in black uniforms and one has an automatic weapon. Someone slams the door of the SUV and Diddlie turns to look too.
“Oh look Fred, it’s Rank, out there with our Militia! Come on Mr. Liddlell, we have to go.”
She puts a few small stems of flowers in the back pocket of her jeans where they wave as she bends over and unties the string bag from the chair leg. She picks up Mr. Liddlell in her arms, and I follow her out to the hallway. She leaves all her flower work, and runs surprisingly fast down the hall, past the hatch and the old bedroom and through ruins of the old sunroom and onto the terrace in back, where they let off fireworks on the Glorious Fourth last year.
“Come on Fred, you have to move much faster or I’ll miss Mr. Fawkes. Oh God! I am late for Mr. Fawkes.”
Diddlie leads the way, racing back with Mr. Liddell to his hutch in her carport.
