Castle Murders

One Abelard, South Dakota

It was a stark and dormy night.

The campus was quiet. Northeastern State University wasn't the liveliest of schools, and it was Monday night, and it was snowing again, the wind howling out of the plains. Nothing to do but stay in the dorm and study.

There was enough on Melanie McDaniel's study agenda. Deadlines were approaching: a paper for Philosophy 101 on Aristotle's Ethics was due in three days, and one on Conrad's Nostromo, for English 125 (20th Century British Novels), had been due three days ago. There was a calculus test tomorrow. Other stuff. But Melanie didn't feel much like studying. She didn't feel much like doing anything but fiddling on her computer.

Fiddling was what it was. Melanie was on-line via modem to the campus's computer bulletin board system, or "BBS." Through it she was plugged into a worldwide network of amateur computer users called the CyberNet. The Net was a forum, a meeting place, for people who liked to gab about anything and everything. The discussions were grouped into topic-areas, with subjects ranging from current events to "Star Trek" to computer software. Melanie posted messages in many areas, but she particularly liked Woman Talk: The National Women's Forum, a cross between a slumber party and a backroom political caucus.

The cathode-ray tube of Melanie's IBM clone displayed:

She looked out the window. Icy snowflakes ticked against the glass. Abelard was completely blotted out. Nothing was visible except an outside light in the quadrangle, a yellow halo in the darkness. She thought about Chad and about how the last thing he had said to her was that he needed "space" and that the relationship wasn't going anywhere and that he needed to be free of commitments in order to concentrate on getting through a tough term on his way to his economics degree. Maybe when he was through grad school and had his MBA he'd be ready for a serious relationship.

Yeah? So then what was he doing now, impaled as he was on the claws of Nadine Borkowski? She was into him deep. He'd even cut his hair and sold his BMW motorcycle. She wasn't about to ride on the back of that thing, so what did he need it for? Yes, Nadine. Anything you say, Nadine.

Chad wasn't polygamous. He was just dumb. Dumb to fall for that domineering, scheming, lowborn, vile, deceitful…

She took a deep breath. So what? She'd lost him, and that was that. Did she still love him? Of course; he was terrifically good-looking and a lot of fun. But someone else had snared him, and Melanie was history. Life goes on.

Yes, she was still in love with him.

Melanie typed at the keyboard, telling the BBS to search for messages with the name McDaniel in the "To: " line. A pair popped up, and she keyed in the digits for the first one.

Melanie squelched the message. Another go-around on the abortion issue. She wasn't in the mood for serious discussion right now. Besides, she didn't know how she felt about the issue any more. For years she had harbored the suspicion, unspoken and even unrealized until very recently, that if she were indeed ever faced with the decision of whether to have an abortion, she wouldn't be able to go through with it. Not because of moral qualms, but general queasiness.

Well, now she was faced with it. She was almost sure she was pregnant with Chad's baby. You don't miss two periods and put it down to the whims of nature. Not if you knew your diaphragm had slipped off on at least one occasion. There was an outside chance that the missed periods were due to something else, but…

An abortion? She just didn't think she could go through with it. Funny how you could intellectually believe in a thing and not be able to accept it emotionally.

Without logging off the system, she left the desk and lay down on the bed to cry quietly for a while.

When she was done she got up and sat back down at the computer. She hoped The Blues weren't returning: her depression. She had suffered with it off and on since her early teens, and had once been prescribed medication for it. Now, what with Chad and the pregnancy, a bad bout of The Blues was a danger.

Drying her eyes, she punched in the other message number.

Melanie smiled. She liked Linda and had been exchanging messages with her for several months over the private channel of the system. Linda knew everything about Chad and about Chad's straying off to Nadine. Melanie had been very open, spilling everything but the pregnancy. That was still top secret.

The body of Linda's message read:

Melanie gave the computer instructions to boot up the wherewithal to post a message. The process was the computerized equivalent of writing a note on a piece of paper and thumbtacking it to a cork bulletin board, except that it was done with electrons, not paper and metal and cork.

Her eyes filled with tears and she was blinded. By the time she'd dabbed her face dry with a tissue she saw that she had inadvertently hit Control-s. The message had been "Saved" and posted on the system. Well, she'd just kill it and start all over again ― but then she shrugged. What the hell. Leave it. She didn't feel like BBSing any more tonight.

She was about to log off, when she noticed something blinking in the upper left corner of the screen. It was a prompt, and it read PRESS "R" TO READ INCOMING MESSAGE. She'd never seen anything like it before. Was the System Operator trying to talk to her on-line?

She hit R and the message spilled across the screen at 2400 bits per second.

Melanie was puzzled. All this time she had assumed that Linda was posting from a BBS far away in another city. It took days, sometimes weeks for a message on the CyberNet to negotiate the maze of interconnecting phone lines and reach its intended recipient, and the same length of time for an answer to get back. The Net was not a direct-communication system. That would cost a lot of money, and the Net was a nonprofit system. A bulletin board didn't work like that. It was slow; however, it was cheap.

But Linda was answering a message that Melanie had just posted minutes ago. That was impossible, if Melanie understood the way the Net operated. The only way it could happen was if Linda were sitting at the terminal of the university's BBS computer over in the Student Union, just a block away.

But the message's Origin line had read "The Castle BBS," not the "Eagle's Eyrie," the name of the university system. Melanie had never noticed a location tag for The Castle, but it had to be outside the university.

At the SELECT: prompt she hit R for "Reply" and TO: LINDA BARCLAY came up automatically. For "Subject" she hit the RETURN key and the computer reproduced Linda's subject line: WORRIED. She began typing the body of the message.

Suddenly the keyboard froze. She vainly jabbed random keys and hit RETURN,but nothing happened. Then:

On the screen, the cursor had moved to a blank line. Melanie was puzzled. She typed:

Melanie thought about. She was indeed thinking of doing something. But what she typed was:

Melanie sighed. No use to hide it.

Melanie was amazed.

Melanie thought it over. What the heck. What else was she doing that was so important?

The cursor blinked at her silently. She sat and waited for half a minute, then keyed:

Melanie frowned.

Melanie didn't know what to say. She got up and went to the closet of the small dorm room and put her hand on the doorknob. Was this some practical joke, some jape designed to make her feel foolish? If so, it wasn't very funny, and it didn't seem like a thing Linda would do. But what else could it be?

She turned the knob and opened the door.

The closet was full of her roommate's junk, just as before. No change.

So it was a joke after all. Melanie didn't understand.

Then she saw light coming from the rear of the closet and suddenly noticed that it looked as if the back wall had been torn out. Light was coming through from what she presumed was the room next door.

"Melanie?"

It was a woman's voice, and one she didn't recognize.

"Who is it?"

"It's me, Linda. Can we clear some of this junk out of the way?"

Melanie shoved aside her roommate's four winter coats ― one of which was fox fur and very expensive ― and revealed a smiling face.

"Hi! Melanie? I'm Linda."

Linda was pretty and blond and had large blue eyes. Her teeth were very white and even.

"Hi," Melanie said. "You were right next door all the time?"

"Not exactly. Is all this stuff yours?"

"No. My roommate ran off to Peru with a guy, an archeologist. She left all her stuff."

"So you have the place to yourself, eh? Great. Want to come through?"

"Uh… okay."

Melanie shoved the tangle of clothes to one side and made an opening for herself, which she slipped through, ducking under the low shelf. She stumbled on a guitar case, and Linda helped her out the other side.

What was on the other side was not another dorm room. It was an immense chamber with a vaulted ceiling, filled with strange and wondrous things. The place looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie. Melanie's gaze was torn between the huge machines resembling electrical transformers along the far wall and an arrangement of even stranger components in the middle of the floor.

"That's the computer I've been working with," Linda said, pointing to the latter grouping. "It's a mainframe."

"A mainframe?"

"Yeah, but it's different from your average computer. Works by magic."

"Magic?"

"Yeah. Come over and meet Jeremy. He's our computer whiz."

Linda led Melanie across the floor and around a U-shaped wall of instruments. Seated at a terminal in the middle was a thin young man in blue tights and a red tunic ― he looked no more than sixteen years old.

Jeremy looked over his shoulder. "You want to hold the portal, or can we let it float?"

Linda turned to Melanie. "Are you going to stay with us for a while? We can call the portal back any time."

"Uh, sure. Yeah, I'll stay."

"Break the spell, Jeremy."

"Sure thing."

Jeremy jabbed at the keypad, looked at the screen, then sat back and swiveled around. "It's broken."

Melanie looked back at the wall. The opening was gone, replaced by dark stone. She turned back to Linda, who, she now noticed, was dressed in black tights, pointed shoes, and an orange and white striped doublet. She looked like she was dressed to play Hamlet.

"Linda, where are we?"

Linda smiled brightly. "Welcome to Castle Perilous."