The Intangibles Read online

She shook her head.

  “Freer?”

  “No,” she sobbed.

  “Okay. And still, this is not it.”

  He stood up and took the safety line again.

  “No! No!” she shouted.

  He ignored her plea and roughly pulled her to the edge, then checked the safety line, gave it a jerk, and kicked his victim.

  With a scream, the girl fell over the edge and disappeared somewhere between the floors, but still hanging. The only thing that didn’t let her fall was the belay device and the stopper on the gear belt of the red-bearded guy.

  He was holding the line tight. Even though he was much bigger and stronger than the girl, he had to brace his feet with much effort to prevent her from falling.

  Max was desperately trying to find a solution. He would materialize any moment now. But what could he do to beat this maniac? He could well make things even worse. The guy may get distracted and lose control of the line. What could he do?

  He thought for a moment and rushed to the stairs, going down into the room one floor below.

  Between the floors, the girl was helplessly hanging by the safety line, which rubbed against the concrete slab and screeched.

  “I’m gonna lift you up if you tell me about your biggest sin!” She heard his voice from the upper floor.

  The safety line screeched again as he pulled the girl up a few inches.

  “Give it to me!” demanded the red-bearded guy.

  Chloe screamed in desperation.

  “It’s no use yelling! No one can hear you! Give it to me!”

  A horrible rasp, and Chloe suddenly dropped, reactively fluttering her hands and screaming. Darkness concealed her face, but Max clearly perceived the horror that she felt.

  “I let my boyfriend take nude pictures of me!” Chloe shouted. “Pull me up! Do it!”

  Another jerk and the girl dropped again, stopping three feet above the floor where Max now stood. She was swinging back and forth like a pendulum: back and she was over the floor, fourth and she was over the abyss. And the safety line was making its screech.

  “I see you’re a real whore!” the big guy said slowly. Though unseen, his low and loud voice was clear. “Come on, I’ll give you two more shots. Let’s finish it.”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know what you want to hear!” yelled Chloe and burst into tears again. “I swiped fifty dollars from you!”

  “Oh dear! That’s just not it…” he said slowly again, and after a pause continued. “You should know something. I’ll tell you something else about our church. It might help you. The Spider is capable of moving through the air. This is what connects us to heaven and gods. This is why we deem the Spider as the link between worlds. And this is why he guides the soul in its afterlife journey either to heaven or the underworld. Here we perform his job… the Spider’s job…”

  Chloe was swinging and sobbing. The panic that clenched her went away and now she just felt apathy. She couldn’t care less about her future.

  “You must have realized that today I am your guide. And if you behave and repent, you shall live a little longer…”

  Suddenly, Chloe sensed a motion and looked up. A young man wearing a pair of jeans and a vest stepped out of the darkness. He put his finger to his lips. A peculiar bracelet threw light on his face.

  The red-bearded guy again made his presence known. “You never realized your biggest sin!

  Max carefully grabbed the girl by the jacket, pulled her over and gestured her to keep talking.

  “What do you want to hear?” she yelled.

  “Your biggest sin,” he yelled back, “is you making me commit sins! It’s you not being ashamed of exposing your juicy body!”

  “But you’re my guardian! I trusted you as I would my father, I didn’t even think of…”

  A rustle came from above and the safety line moved. Max and Chloe froze. The guy must have gotten tired and sat down.

  “You’re a whore, damn you!” he went on. “I’ve been thinking of you and screwing you in my thoughts a thousand times! This is my sin and I can’t live with it. And no confession will ever help me!”

  Max took a jack-knife out of his pocket and began to cut the line. The small blade just slid back and forth, almost with no result. Yet Max kept going. Slowly, the blade did what it was supposed to do. The line started to yield.

  “Hey! What’s this silence supposed to mean?” The red-bearded guy jerked the rope. Chloe screamed and grabbed onto Max.

  “Help me, please,” she whispered.

  Max looked up and peered into her eyes. He saw a plea and dread there, and resumed cutting the rope even harder. He was halfway there.

  Another jerk, and the girl was pulled toward the edge; Max had to use all his strength to hold her.

  “You bitch!” screamed the big guy and bent over. “You think I will let you escape, you whore?”

  The next moment, his feet appeared. He swung a couple of times and jumped down.

  He missed by just an inch. Perhaps, had there been a little lighter, he would have been able to estimate his effort better and land right beside Max. Risky as it was, he could have.

  But he jumped the gun. His feet barely touched the floor and he slipped, pulling his bulky body down.

  For Max it looked like slow motion: the guy jumped down, didn’t manage to land firmly on his feet, lost his balance, and slid down. Though his fingers did grasp the edge, his feet couldn’t find anything to stand on. He gasped and rushed toward the ground. The safety line dropped and started to quickly unreel. Chloe saw that and a shadow of grief and submission blinked in her eyes.

  “No!” Max yelled and clasped her by the hand even harder.

  But it was not hard enough, as the powerful force yanked the girl out of his grip and pulled her down after the red-bearded man.

  Max took a step toward the edge. His heart felt like it was going to jump out of his chest. He saw Chloe falling into the abyss after the big guy, but could not do anything about it. Her fall seemed endless to him.

  He felt numb as he watched the fog devour the girl.

  One instant and it was all over. Max heard the distant thud of the inevitable. The thud of the sigh of death, which he had not managed to prevent.

  Max glanced at his bracelet that he’d once named the Switch. It was glowing in the dark. He ran his fingers over it. Numbers showed up on the little screen, which looked like the face of a digital watch.

  A moment later, Max was once again the Man Who Is Not.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Sex Chess

  “Oh, come on! We’ve been working together for so long! Why don’t you let me try it? You don’t trust me? Why?”

  Max was sitting on the sofa, elbows on his knees, rubbing his forehead with his fingers. He was staring at the person who spoke to him, but his attention was wandering to something disastrous that had happened recently, something that had disturbed him for the entire night and the whole never-ending day after.

  Yet the guy was talking a mile a minute. He looked to be around 25 years old, wore glasses and a shirt with a stale odor. His words reached Max’s ears from afar and echoed inside his head. But all these sounds did not make much sense to him; he couldn’t make them out, though he looked right at the guy. The only thing that made sense to Max was the incident that he was unable to undo: the girl that he was unable to bring back, and the chance to save her he had been unable to take… It was swarming inside his head and causing throbbing pain.

  “Hey, Max! Are you with me?”

  The guy with glasses got closer and snapped his fingers several times in front of his face. Max shooed him away like a bothersome fly.

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “What’s up with you?” Eddie moved back and frowned, which made his eyebrows behind his horn-rimmed glasses move together, and continued in a higher voice. “How many times have I asked you, what are you afraid of? What can possibly happen? You have a whole bunch of settings in your Switch! It’s got a se
curity code and no one but you can use it. Just set the timer and go! What can I do with it?”

  “That’s not the point, Ed…” Max looked down, rubbed his temples, and saw the image of the red-bearded guy from the Church of the Spider. Eddie had told Max about that church. As far as he could tell from his enthusiastic stories, its adepts were rather spiritual and believed in ancient myths about “Spider the Creator weaving the cosmic threads.” However, last night’s experience with the zealot and his young victim did not quite match the uplifting theories of the Church of the Spider…

  “Then what? What is the point? We are done, the bracelet works, all the functions were tested. By you!”

  A drop of saliva came out of Eddie’s mouth, but he was speaking so vehemently that he didn’t even notice. He kept ranting and stabbing Max in the chest with his finger, as if it helped him make his point.

  Max moved Eddie’s hand away.

  Eddie moved back and started pacing their small office, furnished with only a sofa, a desk, and several drawers.

  “It’s risky,” said Max. “Something might go wrong. Besides, you haven’t completed your training.”

  “I did! A long time ago!”

  “No, you didn’t,” Max insisted. “You handle the one-minute interval quite well, but five or ten minutes you don’t.”

  “Oh really!” Eddie smiled ingratiatingly, took the smartphone from the desk and pointed at the screen. “Here, look. These are my training records. You kept them yourself.”

  “I know. Right. But none have hundred percent results. We need exactly one hundred percent interval control.”

  “Look here and here.” Eddie left marks on the touch screen with his finger; he was very agitated. “What else do you want?”

  “I repeat, we need one hundred percent results. Besides…”

  “Besides what?”

  “You know very well how it can end if you skip something.”

  Max’s face flushed with a distant memory flashing through his head and quickly fading into the labyrinths of his past.

  Eddie shoved the smartphone back and chanted.

  “This… has… all… been… taken… into… account. We have been working together for many years. All this time I’ve been helping you. Of course, all these are inventions of your father and yours, you being the scientist dynasty, right? And I’m just an ordinary programmer, right?” Eddie chuckled.

  “Stop it.”

  “No.” Eddie couldn’t stop. “If I hadn’t helped you, all these would not be worth a nickel! And I’ve been helping you as a friend, I’ve been working on the coding. You’d be broke if you had to pay me for all this work! But I didn’t charge you a single cent! We’re friends! And this is your appreciation?” Eddie’s voice broke.

  “Look…” Max said more softly.

  “No! You look!” Eddie didn’t let Max finish. His eyes glowed with anger and he sputtered as he spoke. “Just don’t think that I am going to take this much longer! All I’m asking you is to let me try the Switch! Just one try! Five, ten minutes tops! Yet you’re afraid, you don’t trust me for some reason, even though we’ve been working together for years and I’ve always shown my loyalty! Anyone else would have dropped it and left! I can’t have you disrespecting me like that anymore. Do you think that I won’t leave and develop my own Switch?”

  Eddie stopped, but Max still noticed a mischievous and frantic look in his eyes.

  “Calm down.” Max broke the intense silence. “Don’t think that I don’t trust you. That’s not the point. It’s just…I had a rough day yesterday.”

  Eddie nodded and approached the window without a word.

  “Okay. Let’s try,” Max acquiesced.

  Eddie lit up.

  “Ten minutes only.” Max showed all his ten fingers, like it could serve as an additional argument for Eddie. “Anyway, you do need to understand how the Switch works.”

  “So, I need to try it.” Eddie smiled. “Thanks, mate! I really appreciate it.”

  Eddie eagerly watched the bracelet as Max took it off.

  “But please be careful. Ten minutes.” Max touched the bracelet lightly to set it. “Now, your clothes…”

  Max aimed the bracelet at Eddie and it scanned him with an invisible beam. Eddie was so excited that he could barely stand still as he reached for the desired gadget. Max entered some additional settings.

  “That’s it. Put it on.”

  Eddie took the Switch with trembling hands and fastened it. It took him a few times to get it right.

  “I’m a bit nervous,” said Eddie.

  “Don’t be. Just keep the time under control. Actually, get back well before the time runs out. Okay?” Max briefed him as he opened one of the drawers and took a box out. From the box he got out a pair of glasses with bluish lenses.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Eddie nodded and disappeared.

  Max put on the glasses, and a blue, specter-like figure appeared in front of him. Intangible Eddie was looking in amazement at what had just been his arms and legs. When he’d seen enough, he tentatively approached the wall, hesitated a little, and reached for it. The blue outline of his hand fused with the wall and then disappeared. In an instant, Eddie disappeared behind the wall completely.

  * * *

  Amazing. The body was intangible, yet all his senses were still bright! Eddie was overwhelmed with emotion. The incredible, one could even say metaphysical, powers of the gadget that he and Max had been working on for years were now there to be experienced in full. And nothing could compare with it. Every wall he walked through became sort of a part of him, and he felt god-like in that moment. For god’s sake, he was a god now! Defying all the natural laws, he, Eddie, walked through walls and could see what they were hiding. Eddie moved through the offices of the building, getting familiar with his new powers.

  He saw a clerk in one of these offices who looked bored with his paperwork. Eddie stopped. A middle-aged man was lazily typing something on his computer. He knew that he was alone, so he suddenly leaned back and gave a thunderous burp.

  Eddie moved on, entering the next office. It was empty and dark. There was nothing interesting there, so the intangible visitor kept going.

  After a few more similar offices, Eddie found himself in a long hallway with identical doors that differed by the signs only.

  Suddenly, he heard the sound of heels coming from the elevators. Eddie turned around and saw an outline of a woman against the light at the end of the hallway. The heels were coming faster, then slower, then faster again. Perhaps she was in a hurry.

  She came very close to Eddie, almost bumping into him. He forgot that he was in the intangible state and jumped aside.

  The tall black beauty flew by, tracing amazing zigzags with her hips and clicking her high heels loudly. Her long, curly hair playfully bounced up and down her shoulders in sync with her steps.

  Eddie perked up and rushed after her.

  The girl approached a heavy door with a plaque reading, “White Swan Modeling Agency” and ran her ID card through the locking device near the door knob. The door opened and automatically closed behind her with a click.

  Eddie snuck through the door after her. He was still blown away by the absence of barriers for his intangible body.

  He found himself not in the office, but rather in a hotel suite. The girl had turned left and disappeared into one of the rooms, apparently a bathroom.

  “Finally!” someone said from the room.

  Eddie walked toward the source of the voice and entered a bedroom with a huge bed. Carefully draped windows hid it from prying eyes. The decor and, most importantly, the furnishings made the purpose of the room pretty obvious.

  On the huge bed lay a leggy blonde with a ponytail. She looked bored. Her white patent leather shoes were crumpling the fresh sheets. With her eyes, she was drilling a hole in the faux fireplace across the room and monotonously chewing gum. Her plump, bright red lips were moving slowly. Her long, neatly colore
d eyelashes now and then dropped and covered her unnaturally blue, almond-shaped eyes. A small white crown with blue rhinestones mesmerizingly dazzled in the dim light. Her lacy underwear was peeking through her white negligee. But for the mouth noisily chewing the gum and flapping eyelashes, one could have mistaken her for an enlarged Barbie doll.

  Across the bed, next to the fireplace, stood a man in jeans and an elegant navy-blue jacket. He was around thirty-five. In his hands he had a tablet. He moved his eyes from the screen to the blonde and back. He frowned, turned around, fixed the camera on the wall above the fireplace, glanced at the screen once again, and nodded. Now he looked satisfied.

  “It’s good now,” he said.

  The blonde took a deep breath and stretched her legs, crumpling the snow-white sheets even more.

  “Knock it off!” The man approached the blonde and rudely moved her legs off the bed. She made a sour face. He set the sheets straight and turned to a big black guy who was sitting in the chair by the bed, sipping a glass of whiskey on the rocks.

  “Joe, that’s it. I need you to be in good shape.”

  Joe nodded and put the glass down on the small clear table.

  “I am in good shape, Billy.” He smiled smugly and got up.

  His black leather pants were so tight that they almost tore apart. He straightened up and one could see his thick body and muscles beneath his mesh T-shirt that looked like armor.

  “You’re a hell of a knight,” chuckled Billy. He looked at Joe, who was taller than him almost by a foot.

  “So, where is she?” Billy looked at the screen and yelled, “Leeza!”

  Answering his call, the black beauty sailed out of the dark hall. Eddie was flabbergasted by the change in her look. So was Billy.

  Her magnificent, slim body was decorated with a scarlet thong and scarlet leather bra that was revealing everything that a bra was supposed to conceal. The only thing that somehow covered her charms was the thick curly hair, tar-black, streaming down her back, shoulders, and breasts like a waterfall. On top of her head she had a tiny crown, just like the one on the blonde’s head, but red. Her heels were as high as they could possibly be, completing the image of this steamy beauty.