Chapter Five

 

 

"Dark night!" At Ryan's shoulder, J.B. peeked out past the edge of the open door.

 

Doc, looming over Jak, also expressed his surprise. "By the Three Kennedys! We are transmogrified from a mat-trans unit into an ordinary house."

 

"Not many houses got a gateway hidden away in a deep root cellar," Mildred said.

 

The door opened into a hallway of what looked, as Doc had said, like a perfectly ordinary American house. It was sparsely furnished in a style that seemed a little out-of-date for the end of predark times, with a three-legged semicircular table holding some dried flowers and a high-backed bench seat with a red padded chair on either side of it.

 

There were a couple of spaces on the wall where the paint was a distinctly different, brighter color, showing that paintings or mirrors had hung there at some time.

 

Ryan could see that the hallway veered to the right in a sharp right angle, and he moved cautiously toward it. He glanced into the open doors on both sides, seeing that the place was more or less fully furnished, though odd gaps showed where things had been moved or removed.

 

J.B. glanced behind them. "That door used to have a curtain or a tapestry in front of it to hide it," he said. "See the rail above it?"

 

Ryan looked back, seeing that the Armorer was right. "Seems more and more that this is like that house in Russia," he said. "Might've been a sort of diplomatic home, and they used it to secretly build a gateway."

 

The angle in the hall revealed the front door of the mansion and a flight of stairs.

 

Ryan stood still and held up his hand. "Quiet a moment."

 

It was totally silent.

 

All of the outer windows had the impenetrable shutters bolted over them, making it impossible to see out. But the patterned glass in the front door of the house was clear, showing bright sunlight. The light streamed through the stylized stained glass, with a picture of waves of cherry-tree blossom and a long-legged stork with a fan of feathers in its tail.

 

"Should check upstairs," Jak said, his brilliantly white hair catching the soft pinks and greens of the filtered sun through the glass.

 

Ryan was at the bottom of the wide flight of uncarpeted stairs. He stooped to look at them, running his finger through a layer of reddish dust. "No need, Jak. Nobody been up or down in a good few days."

 

"Or months," Doc said. "As a great man once said, you don't have to worry about dusting after five years, since the dust gets no thicker."

 

"What great man?" Krysty asked distrustfully, suspecting that the old man had made the quote up himself.

 

"I forget."

 

Mildred smiled. "I know. For once Doc's actually telling the truth. It was an amazing person called Quentin Crisp. A gay Englishman and style guru. Used to live in New York."

 

Ryan shook his head, lifting the hand with the SIG-Sauer. "Enough chat," he said.

 

There was another little Buddhist shrine just inside the door, with its own clump of smoking incense sticks tucked into a pierced copper bowlmusk flavored, this timeand a tiny bronze model of a grasshopper.

 

"We really going to be in Japan when you open that door, lover?" Krysty breathed. "Sure this isn't all some kind of a jump dream?"

 

"If it is but a dream, madam, then it is a dream which we all share." Doc rapped on the floor with the ferrule of his swordstick. "Solid enough, I believe. No ecto-plasmic imitation of reality."

 

Ryan took the doorknob and turned it slowly. He eased the heavy front door open an inch, his good eye to the crack and checked outside.

 

"Looks like we're on top of a hill," he said. "Fire-blast! The air doesn't taste all that clean."

 

The others could smell it now.

 

"Prefer the musk," Mildred said. "You know that's a sort of familiar stink. Like L.A. on a hot, smoggy afternoon when the air turns orange and your eyes sting and your breath catches in your throat. Sort of polluted smell. All my time in Deathlands, I never did smell anything like that before."

 

Ryan blinked again, feeling a sharp prickling behind his right eye. "Formal garden that could do with weeding. Lot of stones, as well."

 

He opened the door a little wider, feeling more secure now that there was no sign of human life outside. "Trees. Pine and some little apple and plums. Few big oaks and Don't know what that sort of weepy tree is."

 

"Cypress," Mildred told him. "And those are beautiful azaleas beyond the dry fountain."

 

A rectangular area of raked gravel was covered with dead leaves and patterns of larger stones, some of them as large as a man's head.

 

"I believe it's a Zen garden," Doc said. "Though certainly a little neglected."

 

"Can't see anything beyond the trees and bushes." J.B. took off his glasses and wiped them, then put them on and sniffed. "Doesn't make it much better. Definitely a nasty sort of haze in the air."

 

Ryan finally stepped out, finding himself on a narrow porch that ran the whole considerable length of the front of the house. There was a wickerwork sofa, designed as a garden swing, at one end, though it had ripped away from one of the rusted couplings and scraped back and forth in the light breeze.

 

All the windows along that flank of the property were concealed by shutters, and when Ryan stepped down onto the garden path, he was able to look back and up and see that all the second-floor windows were also sec shuttered.

 

He also noticed that there had once been a flagpole fitted above the door, though wind, weather and time had contrived together to remove it.

 

"I bet your fedora full of fresh-minted jack that this place used to be some kind of official U.S. residence," he said. "And Old Glory must have flown from up there. See where the pole used to be fixed?"

 

"Makes sense." The Armorer took off his spectacles again and rubbed at his eyes with a linen kerchief. "This air sure stings," he said.

 

"I believe that Japan, in the last years of predark, was one of the most polluted places on the face of this noble planet." Doc also wiped at his eyes. "Industry run rampant. Asthma and all manner of respiratory ailments plagued a significant section of the population." He coughed. "But enough of this merry persiflage, my friends."

 

"What's persiflage, Doc?" Jak asked.

 

"Raillery and jolly banter, my sweet, ice-topped youth. Not all that appropriate, considering our somewhat parlous position here, I fear."

 

Ryan started to walk away from the house, his combat boots crunching through the leaf-littered gravel, the SIG-Sauer still cocked in his right hand. The dry fountain had a dead animal in it, what looked like a mutie rat, with unusually floppy ears and a feathery tuft on the end of its extremely long tail. The statue at the center of the moss-crusted stone bowl was a kneeling woman in a flowing gown, covered in pale green verdigris.

 

"Come on, folks," he said. "Let's keep it on double red for a while."

 

The tumbled remains of what might have been a watchtower stood in a corner of the garden, up against a high wall of creamy stone, with residual loops of razored wire laid along its top.

 

"Quite a fortress," J.B. commented.

 

Ryan turned back to gaze once more at the big house. There was something about the design that was definitely not true American, something in the angle of the peaks of the roof and the shape of the windows.

 

At the end of the driveway was a pair of double gates, at least twenty-five feet high and forty feet wide. They were made of wrought-iron, the gaps filled with corroded sec-steel panels. Sharp spikes were set along the top.

 

Ryan looked at the formidable obstacle, thinking how appropriate J.B.'s comment had been. The place really had been a fortress.

 

"Something's going down, lover," Krysty said, tugging at Ryan's sleeve.

 

"What? Danger?"

 

"There's people around. Quite a few of them. Close to us. Not sure whether they're a threat."

 

"Might I proffer a suggestion?" Doc asked.

 

"Yeah." Ryan had reached the gate, hesitating, fingers reaching out for the ornate handle.

 

"Dear John Barrymore hasn't yet utilized his miniature sextant. It might be of some assistance to know for certain where we are, might it not?"

 

"Guess so. J.B., give it a try."

 

The sun was smiling down from a sky of almost unsullied blue, with just a few tiny wisps of pinkish cloud gathering at the far north.

 

The Armorer reached into one of his many deep pockets and plucked out the little scientific instrument. Built in predark times, it was of a degree of technical sophistication that it would now be impossible to reproduce. He aimed it at the sun, turning the little milled wheel on its side, checking the angle and reading off the measurement, his lips moving silently.

 

"Tell you one thing," he said.

 

Ryan raised an eyebrow. "What?"

 

"Not in Deathlands. Reading's about one thirty-two by thirty-five. Near as I can recall from the old-world maps, that definitely puts us the other side of the Cific Ocean."

 

"Japan, John?" Mildred asked as J.B. folded the sextant and put it back in his pocket.

 

"Probably. Yeah. Close as I can tell, but I don't have the least idea where precisely we've ended up."

 

"There was a lot of political tension between us and the Japanese in the last few years before skydark," Mildred said. "Trade wars at a high level, as well as threats about tariffs and boycotts and cutting off supplies and aid. I don't think that the sores of the Second World War and the atom bombs have ever really been properly healed."

 

"But they started it at Pearl Harbor," the Armorer protested. '"They only got what they deserved."

 

"I'm not sure it was quite as clear-cut as that," she replied. "I remember reading magazine articles saying that we didn't need to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese were ready to quit."

 

J.B. sniffed meaningfully, making it obvious he didn't place much belief in what Mildred was saying.

 

On the far side of the sec gates, it was possible to see the tops of some slender conifers. A murder of crows suddenly flew noisily into the air, circling, etching their black shadows against the sky.

 

Ryan opened the gate and looked through the gap. They were on top of a steepish hill, the road winding away, lined with a dark mass of pines.

 

The others joined him.

 

"Lovely view," he said, his words punctuated by a hissing sound as two unusually long arrows thunked into the turf a yard in front of him.