by Tim Powers
“I don’t think people have any problem at all,” he called back to Byron.
Then Byron, who had been looking more sick with every upward yard, dragged himself up over the last lip of stone onto the roughly level expanse, and suddenly his dark eyes glittered with renewed vitality.
“You’re right,” he said, some cheer back in his voice. He stood up, shaky as a newborn colt, and took a few steps toward Crawford. “If only we could live up here, and so be sure that the people we met were in fact people!”
Crawford sniffed the cold air uncertainly. He could no longer sense the vibration in the air, but he was sure it was still there, undetectable now because of being horribly higher in pitch. “I’m not sure …” he began.
Then abruptly his initial exhilaration was gone. There was something ominous about the atmosphere on the summit, a frigid vastness that both diminished him and made him seem perishable, in fact actively decaying, in his own eyes; glancing at Byron, he guessed the young lord was feeling it too, for his momentary cheer was gone—now his mouth was pinched and his eyes were bleak.
The sky was darkening and taking on an orange tint, and though it made him dizzy to do it Crawford glanced up at the sun, wondering if the climb could have taken a lot more time than he had thought; the sun, though, was still high in the firmament, indicating that the afternoon was still fresh—but now Crawford was distracted by something else.
There were lines in the sky, faint luminous streaks spanning the heavens from the northern horizon to the Italian peaks in the south; and though it was such a weird phenomenon that he could feel the hairs at the back of his neck stirring, it was at the same time distantly familiar. He had the feeling that he had seen this effect before, unthinkably long ago … and that the effect had been more pronounced then, the lines brighter … and despite the depression that had been increasing in the last several seconds and now sat on his shoulders almost like a physical weight, he was obscurely glad, for the sake of the rest of humanity, at least—for the sake of the infants being born now—to see that the lines had faded since.
Irrationally, he was reminded of the compass-cards shaking in the shop windows by the London Docks, and his whimsical idea that they were fluttering in some magnetic wind.
He tried to trace the memory of the sight of these sky-bands—something about particles from the sun—the particles could come down to the earth’s surface when the bands were weak, and they were poisonous to the … the other sentient race on Earth, the …
He let the thought go; suddenly it seemed presumptuous for a creature as insignificant and despicable as himself to attempt cogitation.
Byron was talking, in an oddly muffled voice. Crawford’s face was buffeted by a momentary puff of wind when he looked across at him, but he noticed that Byron’s voice was not quite in synchronization with the movement of his lips.
And even through the muffling effect of the air Crawford could hear the leaden fear in Byron’s voice. “Behind you,” Byron was saying. “Do you see a person there?”
Crawford turned, ignoring another abrupt punch of wind, and his shoulders slumped in despair when he recognized the figure that stood a few yards farther up the slope.
It was Julia, his wife—but she was as translucent as tinted glass. He couldn’t tell whether the trouble he was having in getting a breath into his lungs was a consequence of the altered air or his own shock.
“It’s a ghost,” said Byron hoarsely. “It’s the ghost of my sister Augusta. God, when can she have died? I’ve gotten letters from her within the month!”
Josephine peered over a shoulder of rock at Michael Crawford and pulled the pistol out of her skirt. She had pushed her goggles up onto her forehead when the light began to dim and redden, and now she could see perfectly—though breathing was getting difficult.
She had lived in the shadow of self-loathing all her life, and so the summit’s psychic field made no changes in her.
And the climb had actually become easier shortly after she had got rid of her flinty guide—toward the end she had seemed almost able to swim up the side of the mountain—and she now had the strength, even with her ruined left hand, to cock the gun. She raised it and aimed it at the center of Crawford’s torso.
He and Byron were standing slightly below her and no more than eight yards away—it was an easy shot, but she braced the gun barrel on a rock to make it certain. Finally she sighed and pulled the trigger.
Through the blinding flare of the detonation she saw her target spin away—but then she noticed the figure standing farther up the slope, and she recognized it as Crawford. Had she shot the wrong person?
But the person up the slope, she now saw, wasn’t solid—the light was glowing right through its substance. Why, she thought with relief, that isn’t Crawford; that’s just his ghost.
Crawford heard the bang, and turned—and then he sprang away to the side, for he had seen a shiny ball rushing through the air toward him as fast as an angry bee.
And all at once he felt as if he had jumped into an invisible haystack. He heard the pistol ball buzz past him, and felt the shock wave of its passage ripple across his body like a caress, but he was too stunned to do anything more than stare down at his feet, which were suspended a yard above the rock surface. He was floating, supported only by the gelatinous air.
It took several long seconds for him to settle to the ground; and only when he had landed did it occur to him to look back in the direction the bullet had come from.
By the reddening light he saw a figure standing behind a bulge of rock eight yards away. Crawford couldn’t guess who it might be, but he assumed the person would have as much trouble moving as he was having, and that he would be safe in ignoring him or her for a little while.
And if the person had another pistol, and shot at him more successfully in the meantime, wouldn’t that actually be a good thing?
He turned back to Julia. She was walking down the slope toward him and Byron, and somehow she was able to walk in this thickened air … though it seemed to Crawford that she was getting more transparent. He wondered if his nausea and light-headedness were indications of near panic.
Byron might not have heard the shot. “I don’t need to know how she died,” he said now in a choking voice. “I killed her. I seduced her, God damn me! That’s what I tried to tell you, that day I picked you up in my carriage. Incest—it wasn’t her fault, she was never strong-willed, and she did resist me at first. And then I left her alone in England with our child … and my horrible ex-wife.”
Byron frowned and clenched his jaw, and Crawford knew he was resisting the despair the mountain’s psychic field was inducing. “My ex-wife drove Augusta to this, I’m certain—I won’t take every bit of blame here, God damn it!—Augusta was so like me, and that harridan I married didn’t have me around to torment any longer.”
The phantom was only a few yards away now, and it was definitely Julia. She was looking directly at Crawford, and her face suddenly curdled into an expression of almost imbecilic hatred. He flinched back and raised his hand, his sleeve rippling so rapidly that it was momentarily a smoky blur; he would have dived back the way they’d come and scrambled or tumbled back down to the valley where Hobhouse and the servants waited, but Byron caught his arm.
The phantom was fading away to complete transparency even as he watched … even as the light got redder and the air got thicker. It now required real muscular effort to breathe. And then she was gone.
But she had only made way for something else—the thick air was humming with the imminence of something else. Crawford tried to scramble back to the place where they’d come up to the summit, but the air was too thick now to push through—it seemed to squeeze his ribs, compressed by the bulk of some approaching thing.
Something was forming, but not on this mountaintop—something immensely bigger and farther away, looming down and across the miles—from the peak of the Jungfrau.
It was made of arcs of darkness that gath
ered out of the dimming sky, and though it never did attain anything much like form, something in his blood or his spine or the oldest lobe of his brain recognized it as feminine and leonine, and as it leaned down over the three people on the Wengern summit, eclipsing the whole sky, its malevolence was as palpable as the cold.
Tears sprang from Crawford’s eyes and hung in the air like gelatinous gnats.
The thing in the sky spoke, shivering the crystal air with a voice like rock strata shifting. “Answer my riddle or die,” it said. After a long pause it spoke again. ‘What is it that walked with four limbs when the sunlight had not yet changed, and now is supported by two, but will, when the sunlight is changed again and the light is gone, be supported by three?”
Crawford exhaled, and the spent breath was a bulk in front of him, pushing his head back against the resisting air.
“Four, two and three,” Byron managed to say. “It’s … the riddle … of the … sphinx.” Even in this dimming red light Crawford could see that Byron’s face was hollowed and pale. “We’re facing … the sphinx.”
Crawford forced himself to look up at the thing. She seemed to be a lens, warping the magnetic lines into her shape; she was less substantial now than she had been in the days when she had caused the seven great gates of Thebes to be closed in fear of her, and been portrayed in towering stone on the plain of Gizeh, but she had clearly lost none of her power, at least in these high regions.
Crawford fought the induced self-loathing and made himself remember the legend; Oedipus had been confronted by the sphinx, and she had asked him what creature walked on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening. According to the story, the answer had been “man,” who crawls in infancy, walks on two legs in maturity, and walks with a stick in old age. He opened his mouth to force the word into the air, but then he hesitated.
Why was the thing asking? And had Greek mythology preserved the answer correctly? Why would the sphinx want him to say man? And, as a matter of fact, man didn’t seem to be the correct answer to this version of the riddle—there was nothing about infancy that he could think of that corresponded to “when the sunlight had not yet changed.” Whenever that might have been, he didn’t think humans would even have been around.
Who had been? The nephelim? And was the sphinx one of that species? Was he supposed to say you, instead of, in effect, me?
He remembered the flash of primordial memory he’d had when he first saw the streaks in the sky—something about the other sentient race on Earth. Could this riddle be the equivalent of a diplomatic demand of recognition, in which case the answer would be “Both of us"?
Byron opened his mouth to answer it himself, but Crawford waved at him urgently, forcing his hand through the thick air, and Byron noticed and remained silent.
“Remember the … consequences … of a wrong guess,” Crawford told him. “And I don’t think … mythology recorded … the right answer.”
The thing was leaning down closer to them, and Crawford was looking up into the darkness of her gigantic eyes. They were as inorganic as frost crystals, and it was wildly disorienting to recognize intelligence—albeit a profoundly alien intelligence—behind them.
He saw that her mouth was opening, and then the whole summit of the mountain seemed to tilt toward that vast, black maw.
He went with his last guess. “Sentient life on Earth,” he called, forcing the words out.
Something changed then.
The menacing shape still loomed above them, but after a moment Crawford realized that the sphinx was gone—what had been the arch of her wings was now a pattern of cloud on one side and the shadowed flank of the Jungfrau on the other, and the face, which had given such a strong impression of femininity, was just a pattern of stars in the dark sky. The sphinx had receded back to the remoteness of the Jungfrau’s peak.
And the air was finally beginning to loosen—apparently he had given the right answer.
Josephine saw that her shot had somehow missed Crawford—had he actually leaped out of the way?—and she slumped limply, releasing the pistol. Several seconds later her knees and the pistol bumped against the snow-dusted stone.
She remembered the procedure her night-visiting friend had told her about, the alternative to shooting Crawford; she had been confident that the pistol would make it unnecessary, and in any case she wasn’t sure how well it would work in this strange, red-lit, slowed-down world—clearly her guide had never intended for her to be here—but she now had nothing else.
At least she had no self-regard to impede her.
Though her voice clogged with tears, she managed to begin pronouncing the syllables he had taught her, and the air boiled away from in front of her as if the words were a violation of the very space here—again it occurred to her that she was not using this procedure as her friend had intended.
And, as she was speaking, she pulled the goggles off her head and swung them as hard as she could against the stone. One lens broke, and she caught one of the slow-flying fragments of tinted glass, wrestled it to a stop, and then hesitantly forced it up through the air to her face.
It took every bit of her courage and resolve to do it, but her recitation of the litany didn’t even falter when she punctured her own left eye with the piece of glass.
Crawford turned now toward the person who had shot at him—and his heart sank, for he recognized her, and he wondered if he might one day have to kill her. Then he noticed the dark streak down one side of her face, and he realized that she was bleeding.
Good, he thought exhaustedly. I hope the gun blew up in her hand, I hope she’s dying.
She seemed to be pulling something out of her eye. Whatever it was, she now pressed it against the stone, and he heard her sob: “There, damn you—render yourselves visible to such as this.”
Big drops were forming on the stone now, and bulging up, as if the summit were a wet ceiling viewed upside down. Angularities began to form inside the bulges, and then Crawford was able to make out orbs with hollows like eye sockets in them.
Byron tried to walk through the slowed air, then cursed and simply began swimming; it was an awkward way to travel, and at first he propelled himself backward as often as forward, but after a few moments he had frog-kicked over to where Crawford stood.
“Who is that?” Byron demanded, treading air beside Crawford’s shoulder. “And what the hell are those things growing up around her?”
The bulges were breaking open, releasing waving stick-arms and grimacing heads that glistened nastily in the red light … but they were all grown together, so that they formed a hideous centipede-like monstrosity instead of separate figures, and half of them seemed to be partially imbedded in the rock.
“Who cares?” said Crawford, lifting his legs and spreading his arms so that he could swim too. “Let’s get back down.” He began struggling through the air toward the route they had climbed up.
After a few hard-won yards he looked back at Byron. “This slowed-time effect probably ends at the brink—don’t go sailing over the edge.”
“Him,” yelled Josephine, beyond Byron. “You’re supposed to go after him!”
Crawford focussed on her. She was trying to run through the resistant air, but she wound up simply flailing in place, several inches off the ground, and then the melted-together things had seized her and seemed to be clumsily trying to force her down against the stone—to make her into one of themselves? Were they the decrepit ghosts of people who had died up here?
May they enjoy her company, he thought grimly, turning away.
Then, horribly, the things began to speak, and he had to turn back again. “Thought you could abandon your mother, did you, slut?” chittered one of the peeled-looking heads, its voice disorientingly out of synchronization with the motions of its mouth, as several birdy hands fumbled at Josephine’s face. “After killing me! What mother wouldn’t hate a daughter who killed her even as she was trying to give the daughter life?”
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br /> “I had to marry that horrible little nonentity,” squealed another head, “it was the only way I could get away from you! And then he killed me in that inn! Thus your fault–you killed your own sister!”
Several hinged limbs had wetly wrapped around her ankles, and a nearby head added its yapping voice to the babble. “I was always hidden away in your head so that you could be Julia, or a machine, and I’ve rotted in there! You starved me, your own self, and I hate you for it!”
Josephine fell to her knees under the ungainly assault, and she rocked her head back and wailed hopelessly into the barred red sky … and just for a moment she reminded Crawford of—of whom, not Julia—of his brother, who had been pulled under the waves in the savage surf off Rame Head.
With a convulsive jackknife motion that tore his shirt against the unyielding air and punched the breath out of him, Crawford turned around and began dragging himself back through the air toward her.
CHAPTER 11
In the wind there is a voice
Shall forbid thee to rejoice;
And to thee shall Night deny
All the quiet of her sky;
And the day shall have a sun,
Which shall make thee wish it done.
—Lord Byron,
Manfred
The headwind deafened him and peeled his lips back from his teeth at every forward thrust—he was glad of the goggles over his eyes—but between strokes the air was as still as stagnant water, and over his own tortured breathing he could hear a couple of the heads begin to pay attention to him. “Drinking in a pub while I was screwing another man, and drinking there still while I burned to death!” one head called to him.
Another opened its mouth just as he clawed his way forward into the wind again, and he wondered who it would claim to be. His brother? Julia again, but tailored for his despair this time?
When the wind of his forward motion abruptly stopped, he stretched his arm out ahead and managed to grab Josephine’s wrist; then he spread his legs wide to help moor himself to the air, and pulled until his lungs felt as if wires were being twisted in them, but nothing happened.