“I do think this.”
“Well, darling, sweetheart,” said Unthank, “apple of my eye, you’d be wrong.” He slammed his hand on the desktop. “All three of them. All three of their blips. Disappeared. Blip. Blip. Blip. Just like that. Once they’d gone twenty yards, easy. Gone.”
Desdemona was startled by his sudden explosion. “Do not be hard upon yourself,” she said. “Perhaps next time it will not be so.”
“Next time?” asked Unthank, exasperated. “What about the last time? Huh? What’s his name … Carl. Carl Rehnquist. The chubby kid. I worked for weeks, literally, on that copper … crown-thing. I studied volumes and volumes of research on the properties of copper and its effect on magnetic domains, saturation, and ferromagnetics. All that work—for nothing!”
“Calm yourself, darling,” soothed Desdemona.
“And why,” he said, standing up from his chair and walking toward the shelf of white boxes. “Why haven’t literally any of them shown up again? I mean, even if that particular salve or ointment or prosthetic didn’t work, you’d think that maybe one of them would find their way. What about those old men, those survivors? The ones who managed to get out? The ones I painstakingly interviewed? Were they all … lying to me?”
“It’s best not to get so upset,” said Desdemona.
Unthank lifted his finger. “That’s it. This is all an elaborate joke. All those men in those dive bars that I visited; the ones in mental institutions, the ones raving about bands of coyotes dressed in nineteenth-century military uniform. They were just having me on. And guess what? I fell for it. I flipping fell for it, didn’t I?” He stalked over to the desk and began rudely tousling the sheaves of paper on its surface. “Ha-ha. Joke’s on Unthank. The kid who everyone said wouldn’t amount to anything. And guess what? I did. I became a Titan. Machine parts. Showed them, didn’t I? But the other guys always get the last laugh, huh? Like the guy who made this.” Here, he began searching through the paper stack for something in particular, and, not finding it, he stopped in his ramblings and thrust his hands into his pockets. His eyes scanned the room. “Where is it?”
“What, dear?”
“The map. The flipping map, Desdemona. The one that the old man gave me.”
Desdemona, sensing Joffrey’s rising anger, began stepping toward the door. “I am not knowing what you talk about, map.”
Unthank, rifling back through the papers, was shouting now: “The map! The map! The one with the … the things on it. The one that was given to the old man, who gave it me. With the big tree and the mansion!”
“Is not there?”
“No, it’s not there.” Suddenly, a thought occurred to him. “Those kids. The ones who took the transponder unit. One of them must’ve …” His voice trailed off.
“Must’ve …?” prompted Desdemona.
Unthank thrust a finger at Miss Mudrak. “Go search through those girls’ footlockers. They’ve got to have it. They must’ve stolen it.”
“Okay, darling. I will do this. But you must be calmed. You are much too ???????’???.” She huffed loudly and turned to go. But before she did so, she exclaimed, “And do not yell. It is ungentleman.” And with that, Joffrey Unthank found that he was once more alone in the office.
He collapsed his weight into the chair and placed his head on the cool of the desk’s surface. His remaining hair, in the tirade, had been upset and now jutted from his pate like the feathers of a peacock. A bit of snot dripped to the tip of his nose, and he wiped it away on the hem of his sleeve. He sat this way for a considerable time, torturing himself with the memories of his many years of experimentation. He was so tortured by these specters, in fact, that he briefly considered standing up, rushing to the bookshelf, and destroying every glass vial and philter and bringing a crashing end to his life’s endeavor of finding a way into the Impassable Wilderness in a single, ear-shattering moment.
That is to say: He would’ve done this if a knock, at that moment, hadn’t sounded at the door.
“What?” asked Unthank, exasperated.
“Sir,” came a voice. It was Miss Talbot. “Someone to see you, sir.”
He wiped his nose again and flattened the rumpled front of his sweater. “I’m not taking visitors right now, thanks very much, Miss Talbot.”
“It’s a man. He says it’s very important.”
Unthank glared at the door. “I said, Miss Talbot, that I am not receiving visitors.”
There was a long pause, after which Miss Talbot’s voice sounded again through the wood of the door. “The gentleman really won’t take no for an answer, sir.”
“Is he an attorney?” asked Unthank, groaning. He’d had his share of ambulance-chasing lawyers attempting legal sieges on his unscrupulous and somewhat negligent business practices before, though it was never anything a written check and a call to a state senator couldn’t fix.
“I don’t know, sir,” said Miss Talbot.
“You don’t know?”
Another pause. “He’s … well, there’s something fairly strange about him, sir. Something I can’t rightly put my finger on.”
Unthank stared at his hands as he tented them on his desk surface. What was it those Mehlberg girls had said? That their parents were returning shortly? There had been, on rare occasions, parents returning for their children, and it was often a fairly sticky wicket to navigate. He’d found, though, that with the correct tone, even a guilt-ridden parent coming back for a child they’d knowingly orphaned could be easy to placate. He sat back in his chair and tried to assume a calm demeanor. “Very well,” he said. “Show him in.”