Love Machine by Walter Mosley

Author:Walter Mosley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

EIGHT

THE NEXT THING she knew she was walking down a rickety stairway from the first floor to the basement. The cellar was like any other she had seen; rough-hewn tables and benches strewn with tools, piled with boxes, a stacked washer and dryer against a wall under a weak bulb.

There was a hall that led to another part of the underground chamber. Frank led her this way and she followed feeling familiarity in her senses and a strangeness in her conscious mind. It was dank down there and the light seemed to be filtered through green glass.

When they came to the white door the coyote was already there, waiting. As Frank used his key on the lock Lana C licked Lois’s fingers and the self-professed shepherd of scientists scratched the creature behind her long and pointed ears.

The next set of stairs was dark all the way down with a pool of light at the distant base; a light that tried but failed to illuminate the journey down ward.

Lana C scampered ahead while Lois felt her way tentatively, afraid of missing a step and falling.

It was a long way, longer, she knew, than it looked to be.

Reaching the bottom at last, Lois sighed. She and Frank entered a small room that held a large whitewashed table around which sat all the members of the Marchant Lewis cult. The subbasement was like a bunker; like a secret held underneath another secret—locked away where no one could find it, or suspect it, or even imagine it. They all sat in chairs, even the coyote, and in front of each one was a Datascriber half the size of the one used to usurp her mind. The DS Machines (as she came to call them) were connected by a tangle of wires that crossed and jumbled in the center of the table.

There were two empty places. Frank went immediately to his chair and everyone turned to Lois expecting her to take her place.

“I have to know what’s going on first,” she said in answer to the unspoken request.

“This was a child pornographer’s studio,” Marchant rumbled. “They would bring children down here and exploit them for needs that came down from beasts. Frank knew about him and we came in on him one night…”

Lois could see clearly, and simultaneously from four separate points of view, the Family as they closed in on the pornographers. They were slender white men with short haircuts, wearing short-sleeved button-up dress shirts with no ties. One was working a small digital camera while the other was talking to a naked three-year-old boy who was sitting on a filthy mattress, crying.

Lois watched from Marie’s and Frank’s perspectives as Javier approached the men with his semiautomatic pistol. She gazed from their eyes while feeling the blood rush in the Mexican’s veins. Then, for a moment, she saw a dark room with tiny Javier and two dark-skinned men raping him one day that was actually many days one summer twenty-five years before …

And then

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