Chapter Fourteen

The name under the apartment number read “Horatio Bardolf”, a name I assumed to be an alias. I took the elevator to the sixth floor and counted to doors to number 67. The building’s doors bore no numbers of their own. The elevator was dilapidated and ancient. The paint peeled in flecks and corners off the walls. This was clearly a hideaway. A false residence. A front. A place where people came to conceal themselves and not to live. I heard no noises behind the doors or in between the walls. Once a rat scurried across the corridor and disappeared. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sonorous beeping of a large vehicle reversing slowly. The light in the hallway contained no bulb and I was forced to navigate by the time sunlight streaming through a single cracked window.

Horatio’s door was unlocked. I knew this because it hung slightly ajar, revealing the locking mechanism. I knocked anyways. There was no answer.

His living room was disturbingly akin to mine. It was covered with papers and books. A thin film of dust covered the walls and furniture. There was an ancient television set in one corner, connected by a multitude of bizarre wires to the wall. He had constructed his own cable and satellite hookup. No doubt illegally. The papers strewn across the table, chairs and ripped sofa were printouts of minute series of ones and zeros, arranged in infinite variations. Horatio, judging by the evidence, had become the first human being to sight read binary code. He had conquered the language of the machine. No wonder he lived in such astonishing fear.

I glanced into his bedroom for a moment as I passed. It was completely bare. Its walls stripped of paint. There was no bed. A mattress was carelessly thrown into one corner. The sheets had once been white, but were now a sickly off-yellow that made be nauseous to look at.

A cockroach climbed over the pillow and made its way slowly across the bare wood floor.

The kitchen contained only a few tins of tuna fish and preserved fruits. Out of the strangest of curiosities I opened his refrigerator and found a jumbo-sized plastic canister of lemonade and a half eaten chicken sandwich whose edges were slowly turning to brown. The floor was stained with brown and reddish splotches suggesting extreme carelessness with ketchup and coffee. The garbage can was overflowing with cardboard boxes from Burger King and Pizza Hut.

Here was all the evidence of an obsession. Of a kindred soul.

I found him, of course, with his machines. There were six of them. All but one were flickering intensely, running endless vertical and horizontal variations of the binary hymnal. The floor was a tangled cauldron of wires, cables, plugs and soldered ends. I had to pick my way through on my tiptoes to keep from tripping. Stacks of blank discs, stereo equipment, video editing machines, discarded satellite dishes and an infinity of other detritus of the virtual age filled the corners and walls. I saw now that my obsession was nothing. I was here in the presence of the master.

The master was seated in a revolving office chair, complete with ergonomic headrest and wheels which must have been near useless in the clutter that filled its owner’s life and fed his madness. His hands lay still on the keyboard, poised for the next entry, for the next assault on that impenetrable world of dichotomous numerology.

It must have been in that moment, the second before, that they had lifted him slightly from his seat and stove his head into the once-flickering screen. Now it was only a tangled mass of blood, cranial fluid, black plastic and distended wires. Horatio Bardolf’s skull had become a sculpture in grey matter and silicone.

He must have known. They would never have come for him otherwise. Or perhaps simple suspicion was enough. How they had breached his no doubt elaborate security precautions and discovered our brief correspondence, I could not begin to guess. But I had no doubt as to who they were. They had seen the threat that I had only dimly perceived. They knew that Josef6 could truly exist only in the unknown. Horatio Bardolf had pierced the veil which was everything they held sacred. Or he had only claimed he had done it. But this was threat enough. They could not risk the possibility that he had actually done it. It was as terrible to them as death. So they had sought him out. And they had found him.

It was then and only then that I was gripped by the sudden and unutterable fear. It was born of only this simple thought: they did not know either. They had suspected, they had thought, they had guessed, but they did not know. Bardolf had to die because he had claimed to know. Claimed to know the one thing they did not and did not wish to know. The one thing that they and the world must not know. They had killed in the name of mystery. For themselves and for all of humanity. To save it, not from the truth, but from the horrifying possibility of the real. They had gone farther, and become more powerful, than I had ever imagined.

I began to tremble. Now I too, of all people, was a threat to them as well. If they had reached Bardolf they could reach me. I whispered a silent, prayerful thanks to my deceased ally for sending his invitation through a non-virtual medium. It was now time to flee into that world. To escape into the concrete. The real which I had forsaken was now my only defense against him and what he had created. Against the deathly hand which reached towards me out of the electronic maelstrom.