The Weirdness(39)

“We should go,” said Jørgen, as a third cop car arrived. This one parked itself lengthwise, blocking the lot’s wide gate, and Billy had been about to panic when Jørgen touched him on the shoulder and said “This way,” and hustled them back through a hole in the perimeter fence that was hidden by a heaped pile of pallets. On the other side of the fence was a van, what Billy would soon come to forever think of as Jørgen’s Trusty Econoline Van, and they piled in and peeled out, and Billy didn’t have to go to jail, and his friendship with Jørgen was pretty much locked at that point.

He wonders where Jørgen is, anyway, and he feels a sudden, sharp regret at not having been more concerned at Jørgen’s long disappearance. Not that there’s anything he can do about that now, not from jail.

He can’t really do anything about anything. He can maybe, at best, take a piss. He looks again at the combination sink/toilet thing.

He has his pants unbuttoned and is about to get down to it when he feels a sudden concern about privacy. He looks back at the bars and the darkness beyond. Can people see into his cell? When he’s facing the toilet his back is to the door, so it’s not exactly like people can see his junk straight-on, but what is going to happen when he has to take a shit? He tries to imagine sitting there, trying to do his business while some Aryan Nations dude is staring him in the face. He knew prison was supposed to be tough but he didn’t quite realize that every crap he’d take would be within view of prying eyes.

He approaches the bars and peers into the darkness. It’s hard to tell what’s going on out there. He doesn’t see another cell or even a hallway. All he can sense behind the bars is a large, open space of undefined dimensions. He can see shapes and forms but he can’t quite make out what they are. When he moves his head he catches something gleaming glassily. Where the fuck is he?

He presses his face up to the bars, shields his eyes with cupped hands, willing them to adjust to the darkness. Eventually he begins to make out the shapes with greater distinction. He sees cameras. Not surveillance-style cameras but movie cameras, on big dollies.

The cell is a set.

And then he realizes why it seems familiar. It’s a set from Argentium Astrum, the supernatural police procedural. It’s the cell of Gorbok the Mad, the tongueless cultist that the team brings into custody in the first episode, hoping to get him to spill his terrible secrets!

Okay, he wasn’t expecting that.

He tries the door. The lock is real enough. Verisimilitude, he notes, vaguely impressed. But this has to be an improvement. It’s better to be locked into a film set than into a prison; he doesn’t know what’s going on, but he finds that he can at least believe that. He looks at the walls, wondering if he could break them down if he shouldered them hard enough.

Instead he just calls to the darkness: “Hello?”

He hears a voice, somewhere out in the dark studio space, say “He’s up,” followed by an electronic bleep that he recognizes as being the sign-off call of a walkie-talkie.

Interesting, Billy thinks. But not interesting in a good way. He has a sudden feeling that he’s going to be interrogated before the morning is out, aggressively interrogated. His testicles shrink a little.

Before long, he sees a figure walking briskly toward him, through the gloom. He recognizes the spray of curly hair. It’s Laurent, the editor in chief of The Ingot.

Okay, he wasn’t expecting that, either.

“Billy,” Laurent says, warmly. “Good to see you. Good to have you on board.” He sticks his hand through the bars of the cell for Billy to shake. Billy shakes it, a little uncertainly.

“So,” Billy says. “You’re still alive.” One fact at a time seems to be the order of the day here.

“I am,” Laurent says, beaming a bit. “That got a little rough last night, there, a little rough.”

“You’re telling me,” Billy says. “Who got hurt? Anybody?”

“Audience members are all okay,” Laurent says. “We had to do a bit of, what would you call it, cleanup on them, but they’re none the worse for wear. As for the readers: well, there’s you: you got a little zap, not too much fun there, but you’re okay, we’ve got you now, and that’s good. Elisa, the poet: less happy story, frankly, we lost tabs on her, but we’re guessing she’ll turn up. It’s not good for her to be off radar right now, though, not good at all. Of course, the one who took the brunt of the damage dealt out last night was the Adversarial Manifestation, can’t say he came out too well at the end of all the excitement.”