Warren Murphy: Shock Value

I don't want to belong to him anymore, she had said. Still, she had kept the name he had given her.

Remo didn't even know her real name.

So this is how it ends, he thought. The twisted trail leading from another death of another pawn named Orville Peabody ended here, with the girl dead and the monster she had hoped to escape safe behind his electric walls.

"You won't belong to him," Remo said. "I promise you, Circe."

He had made a promise to her before, and had not been able to keep it. In shame and rage, he wrenched his arm upward. He felt two bones in his hand crack and give under the weight of the cement, but the slab loosened. With a spray of dust, it spat out of the floor, crashing on the other side of the room.

Beneath the removed cement was a twelve-inch pole extending so far downward that its base couldn't be seen. The hydraulic lift.

11:59:01.

There was no time to find how to operate it. Remo guessed that the controls were on Abraxas's wheelchair, anyway. Keeping his broken hand carefully out of the way, he wrapped his arms and legs around the pole and slid into the darkness.

The bottom was dank and suffocating, exuding the same musty smell of the cave where Remo had lain with Circe. It brought back memories so recent and painful that he felt them physically, like pinpricks in his chest.

But he wouldn't think of her now. He couldn't permit himself the luxury of self-pity.

From the pinpoint opening at the top of the empty shaft, he guessed that he was more than a hundred feet below ground level. He searched in the darkness of the narrow square for a passageway, trying to enlarge his pupils enough to catch what faint light there was.

He saw nothing. No opening, no electric door, no route to Abraxas. Only the blackness of a four-by-four-foot prison.

Panic crept up on him. What if Abraxas had been lying? True, the cement trap in the floor had been just as he'd described, but a mind as sick as Abraxas's was capable of devising an elaborate obstacle like the trap to serve as nothing more than a diversion for intruders. It was possible that Abraxas was nowhere Remo could reach him before the precious minutes were up. On the other side of the house, perhaps... or the island.

I have planned for everything.

More than a minute had passed since Remo began his descent down the lift shaft. Abraxas would have to be reached soon, or not at all. If Abraxas had tricked him, as the sickening feeling in the pit of Remo's stomach told him he had, time had already run out. The world would belong to Abraxas, and Circe— beautiful, scarred enchantress— had died for nothing.

"You idiot," Remo spat out at himself, kicking the cement-lined wall. His foot swung into air.

Air.

He bent down. It was there, the passageway. Abraxas, in his vanity had told the truth. There was a route leading out of the lift, but it was less than three feet tall— designed for a man in a wheelchair.

Flushed with excitement, he ran, stooped, through the dark corridor. There was utterly no light here. Racing blindly, like a bat, he followed the tunnel, ticking off the seconds in his head.

58. 57. 56.

He pumped his legs harder. The pain in his hand throbbed sharply with each footfall. For Circe, he said to himself. Not the poor suckers watching their televisions, waiting for God to come to them like some glorious prime-time evangelist; he didn't give a damn about humanity. It was for Circe alone. Dead, defeated Circe, who had begged for help and got none.

His breath came quick and ragged. The passageway was long, longer than he'd pictured the house to be. He'd gone nearly a half-mile as it was, and still nothing lay ahead but more blackness and the growing heaviness in his chest.

What accounted for that, he thought, heaving. He never breathed hard. Not even during his exercise runs under Chiun's supervision, in which he forced himself to run at full, leg-wrenching speed over hills so tall that vegetation disappeared at their peaks, had he lost his wind. But now, in this tunnel, he was gasping for breath like a chain smoker in the Boston Marathon.

Still running, crouched and cramping, he attuned his senses to the pressure of the air. He felt it in his ears. Slowly, every fifty feet or so, the pressure increased infinitessimally.

He was running downhill.

And there was a smell permeating the damp cement lining of the tunnel, something pungent, vaguely fishy....

His head shot up with a start. He was heading south, far beyond the reef of the island. What he smelled was the sea. He was underwater.

And going deeper. Abraxas's transmission center was somewhere in the depths of the ocean, protected against unwanted visitors by a million volts of electricity.

26. 25. 24.

Then he saw them, the doors rising out of the blackness like steel monoliths. He could never beat his way through them without electrocuting himself. Even the ways he'd learned for dealing with electric fences wouldn't work with voltage of the magnitude Abraxas had described.

He was unarmed. He looked around helplessly. A piece of cement, maybe, thrown fast enough, could puncture the steel doors, but how much time would that take? He had lost most of the skin on his hand trying to pry loose a small piece of the flooring in the house. It would take even longer to chip a large enough hunk off a smooth wall. Besides, he thought, the hand was broken now. It would be next to useless. No, there was no way through the doors.

Well, one way....

He swallowed. Kamikaze had never been his forte. If anything but the soles of his shoes touched those doors, he'd fry in seconds.

He jarred to a halt some twenty feet away from the massive doors. From the size of them, he calculated it would take some six thousand pounds of thrust to break through the electrified metal. Given his weight, that meant that he would have to travel at roughly half the speed of sound to slap on enough pressure to break them down.

Nobody, not Remo, not even Chiun, had ever moved so fast even at full height. Remo was doubled over in the squat passageway. He would have to run, skittering, like a crab.

Impossible, he decided. It was too big a risk. He'd never live.

He crouched back into the passageway where he'd come, trying to think of alternatives. He forced his mind to a blank. But this time no legends came, no cryptic stories carrying hidden solutions. There was only Circe's face, crying out in the darkness.

Abraxas had won.

"Help me," Circe had said, her remembered voice echoing a memory of a face flickering in candlelight. He had promised to help. Now she was dead, the promise broken.

"Help me..."

12. 11. 10 seconds.

"What the hell," Remo said. Maybe he had lived long enough, after all.

He spun around quickly, before he had time to change his mind, and charged the doors.

His arms hung at his sides like an ape's, flying upward behind him as he gathered speed. His feet burned, literally. The heels of his shoes gave off thin wisps of smoke. He felt the flesh of his face flattening, distorting with the speed.

8.7.6.

Another image came to mind to replace Circe's face. It was something he'd seen on television once, news footage of an airplane wreck on the Potomac. In the film, a man in a crowd watched from the river's edge as the plane went down. He was an ordinary man, from the looks of him, Mr. Average, football on weekends, maybe a few rounds of cards with the boys on Thursday nights. Nobody would have taken him for a hero.

With the other passersby, he watched the plane crash and burst into flames. Like the others, he heard the screams of the dying. He may have felt pity; the others surely did. Or he may have gone a little crazy at the moment when he took in the sight of the icy river tainted with human blood. No one could say. But what he did at that strange, pivotal moment was so peculiar, so brazen, so unreasonable, that the whole country stopped what it was doing to watch, stunned, as the man did what everyone else had been too sensible to do: He jumped in.