My sight returned to the room, now shaded darker than before. Tiny black and white pebbles were scattered across the floor.
Doctor Steel crouched down to examine the objects. “It’s the material the original time doors were made of.”
I picked one up. It had the same feel and satin glow as the carved white angelic feather I found so many years ago in the small New York park.
Steel looked over to the time tunnel door. “There’s no way to examine—”
Pigeon interrupted, his demeanor one step removed from panic. “You’ve located the ruin. Hurry, do what you have to do. Trust yourself. Now.”
I grabbed Jehingofratubalaz’s arm. “C’mon, show me where you sense the nothingness.”
“It resides in the valley below.”
As I scrambled through the door, Tuma called out a farewell, “May the gods bless you.”
Gods? Which god? The one whom I’m supposed to destroy?
I ran through the woods, urging the chameleon to hurry. He loped easily alongside me.
“Where’s Piddles? I don’t think she even entered the cabin.” The universe might have been about to go on a new trajectory. Where was my dog?
Although frantic with worry for my pup and surrounded by tremors that rattled the air, the blind trust I had committed to my quest overcame any regrets about Cassandra and rammed home one message into my gut. Move, move, move.
As we raced downwards, scrambling over the rocky trail, I heard a scrabbling of loose stones behind us. Hoping Piddles was on the path, I looked back to see Cassandra, flapping her arms feverishly, leaping great leaps, bobbing and pecking the air with a hysteria that caused me to hasten my own flight towards the magical barrier ahead of us. I flipped my fingers through the power gesture to open a way through the wall. The empath whooshed through without a pause, and Cassandra wrenched at my hand and wrist. She was a freak, moving through the tunnels without the power to enter them on her own. It was my chance to save her. I could leave her on the other side of the wall. The sky roared in disapproval.
I grabbed her wrist and steered her towards her sainthood.
We tripped past trees, gripping branches to keep us upright, slipped over steep edges to drop blindly into deep ravines. Black fir and hemlock solidified before us from out of a gray fog. We dodged sudden-appearing limbs, celebrated clear paths, cursed our way through thickets. Our feet slapped wet leaves, slid over mossy blockades of stone.
The chameleon disappeared into a skin of thick gray moisture. The bird-lady cackled about nests and eggs and whistled curses and invitations in my ears as she weaved her nakedness and madness step by step downhill.
Blackness swirled below. Sounds of the sky cracking raced overhead.
My hand felt on fire. A golden bolt of lightning leaped from it, slicing upwards through the air. With a thunderous roar and a brilliant flash of light, my hand connected with the ruin above. With each swing of my arm, each clenching of my fist, the tunnel of the gods drew nearer to doom. A rumbling tunnel of nothingness was being born. Terrified, I searched in panic for the collapsed tunnel somewhere ahead of me even as it was being brought into existence all around me. The future, the past, the now—all seemed to be consumed by the other. My hand spasmed with a distorted, painful energy as it grasped to hold onto an eternal hurricane.
Somehow the muscles in my legs still pumped, the sparks in my mind still puzzled, the resolution of my goal still tugged at me.
Panting and huffing, I grasped the bare branches of a fallen tree, using it as a ladder to climb down a sharp cliff. “Hurry. Do you sense it yet?”
“Deets, Deeeeeets.” Screeching like a hawk, Cassandra leaped past me.
Jehingofratubalaz descended the escarpment with a few well-placed steps of his long legs. “Yes, it’s in this area. You’re becoming it. We’re near.”
The air and earth roared and shook. My hand tingled, jerked, fought numbness.
Becoming it?
I may never see anyone again. Mom, Dad, Steph, Teresa, Piddles. Am I about to disintegrate into nothingness?
Then before me, I recognized the path I was to follow. Pine cones littered an uphill trail where tree branches hung arbor-like over it. It matched the scene that had been painted at the top of the stairs on the second floor back in Monster Alley Mansion. My knapsack and boots had been placed against that section of the mural for me to find. Now I was barefoot, but the old stained backpack—pad, pencils, and fer-de-lance damage—still clung to my shoulders.
I stepped under the boughs, studying the landscape before me. It looked as rugged as the terrain we had just traversed. I could sense, not hear, a hissing somewhere ahead of me. A familiar sound, it came from the pit of the void before time, where Shadow Creature clung to the edge of this universe.
I motioned Jehingofratubalaz to go back. “Leave. Get away as far as you can. I don’t know what will happen.”
My eyes met Cassandra’s. “You too. Get out of here. This is none of your...” My words faltered. I knew I was about to lie. “This has nothing to do...” And I let my gaze into her lost and tunnel-worn eyes speak truly. I don’t want you to come with me, to be flung to a faraway time in the past onto a faraway beach. It doesn’t make sense.
The feathers along one shoulder rose and dipped like an ocean wave. She answered my thoughts out loud. “Nor does it make sense for you to have done what you have. It just is. You know what happens to me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to argue with the gods. The tunnels are my life now. I believe this is my price to travel on my own, wherever, to different times and dimensions.”
“Your key past the barriers.”
“Yes.” And then she did the oddest thing. She placed her hand over her lower part of her stomach, above her cunt, and twitched a smile at me.
In the cabin, she asked if she was my sacrifice.
The hissing grew stronger from the path.
I feel my heart is being torn from me. Returning Shadow Creature to nothing. Cassandra awakening in a world four hundred years gone. Why? Do the gods require sacrifice? Gasoline-soaked protesters, soldiers lying in muddy fields, Johnny’s body left to jaguars, the touch of my truest love put aside, a son never to be known.
A darkness swirled around me.
When I was a child, a blue sky with a single angelic star floated above me, comforting me in my feverish dreams.
I stepped cautiously onwards. The woods grew darker, the blackness thicker—weighing against my body, making each step a labor across eternity. The earth was roaring. My nostrils rebelled at a smell of burning flesh.
I looked back. Cassandra’s wings were smoldering.
Jesus, it’s really happening.
My eyes watered—from the surrounding atmospheric fumes, or from my fears and losses, I wasn’t sure, but through my tears I finally saw what I had spent years searching for. It was the gods’ time tunnel—that I could understand—but just a ragged whisper of one. Spots of empty dreams, of lost swirling prayers, and ghostly footprints of the original tunnel lay piled and entangled before me. And beyond or within, lay further ruin I felt compelled to reach.
Off to one side, whether on this physical planet or not, I could hear the farting, murderous misery, confusion, and mindless hatred of something terrible. I knew it immediately to be the being I knew as Beelzebub, tromping on and tearing at the Stogie God’s tunnel. After listening tentatively for a minute or so, I came to the belief that it was an eternal sound from an eternal chore, seeking weak spots into the universe Chaos craved to inhabit. Whether Beelzebub knew where I was or where the collapse lay, I had no idea.
I’ve got to enter, get past the barrier to the tunnel.
Examining the ruinous pile of shadows, I noticed wisps of a smokey haze fading into the ink before me. The strands of vapor carried faint cries in millions of l
anguages, cries that crisscrossed or tangled themselves into repetitious patterns. Despite drifting off to nothing, the voices left a confused weave of echoes across what I perceived to be the passageway.
There, again. My name being whispered.
Totally baffled by the sounds, I forced my attention to the physical aspects of the dark jumble. I hesitantly touched the shadowed mess in front of me. It felt solid. It had to be the wall of nothingness that Jehingofratubalaz had sensed. I began to probe gently in different areas. Kneeling down, I saw a slimy green strand of wet seaweed between my feet. My mind flashed on the battle on the beach and my first full-fledged tunnel leap to ambush Sheoblask. I had shrugged off that very piece of seaweed on a forest trail in the tunnel.
Why is this here? It’s from the beach where I beat Sheoblask into unconsciousness. Ah, now I remember. The patch. The shining patch of skin I peeled off Sheoblask. It showed a path through a pine forest.
I removed the skin from my knapsack. It blazed like a golden sun. Standing in front of the murky barrier, I scratched the top of my head, deliberating whether to use my dog-star power symbol or not. Fearing failure, fearing my opportunity would crumble and my friend would lay trapped in pain forever, I let my right hand place the patch of golden light on the shadowy confusion of a wall.
An eerie moment passed as if someone on the other side of the tunnel blockade had heard a knock on a door and, uncertain of whether they really had, had silenced the universe to listen for another.
I began to move my fingers in a swirling motion around the patch, widening its brilliant golden aura. My hand glowed the same color. Excitedly, I realized a path was opening through the twisted black mass. I would soon be able to step inside.
Then suddenly the roar that had been guiding me for months resounded right in front of me with a tremendous whoomph that knocked me over. The universe disappeared, and a vacuum-like pressure sucked me through the wall.
Into the collapse of the time tunnel.
Cassandra, following behind me, jettisoned by the cataclysmic force that had just exploded, was thrown into a breach of black shadows. Flames cavorted across her wings. Protected by a golden aura surrounding me, I observed the catastrophe unfolding as if a spectator while she was thrust into where the tunnel collapse was forming.
Sheoblask’s Cadillac slammed into the wall of a tunnel, catching a rip of fiery holes in the passageway’s skin. At the same moment, I watched myself falling through time, my hand ripping open the time tunnel as I wrestled with Sheoblask. The convolutions of damaged time travel had begun. Oddly, I could see Doctor Steel before the time tunnel door inside the mansion waving his hands in a complex manner while Santa Pigeon stood in Monster Alley near the ceramic portal.
Then there was a calamity of light and sound with all the ruckus of a god being born against its will.
Steel stumbled and was thrown through the formula wall, crashing against Pigeon. Colored blasts of light flashed as they gestured and shouted to each other, weaving magic symbols with their hands, attempting to complete their jumps to escape the unexpected onslaught, throwing bolts of power at the out-of-control Cadillac tearing apart their surroundings.
I took in new details as an observer of my time-distorted self dodging traffic, racing towards the alley, my hand slapping at the hood of a yellow cab. Stogie God sat scowling behind the steering wheel.
The scene before me began to rip apart. Steel’s body jerked as an invisible force yanked him away from the tortured tunnel. He disappeared. Santa Pigeon was bouncing in and out of view, sometimes in the alley, then gone, then back again. He looked beaten, his traveling form as a bird confused and ragged. Then, he didn’t reappear.
The demon Caddie cartwheeled, then accelerated into oblivion, out of my view.
The tunnel disintegrated. Cassandra was a swirl of flames. The fire around her looked to be a living bird. I could see now that Cassandra was standing in the area where I had found the char marks and pigeon remains. A wild dance of shadows and fire and feathers surrounded her. Her eyes widened and met mine, an eternity of questions leaping between us, then she was gone.
I panicked as I peered into Monster Alley, believing Chaos would flood through the totally demolished tunnel, but instead, from the formula on the wall, a dark figure emerged, gasping and limping, heaving itself deeper into the alley. Obviously suffering, it fell to its knees, grabbed the edge of the ceramic window box in desperation, then slipped itself as a dark fog over the lip. As it did so, I noticed a gleam of light come from one set of symbols and squiggles in the formula. My feathered winged-dog balancing a star on its nose stood illuminated. The light faded, my vision cleared, and I was out of the mixed-up dream.
I had just witnessed the first living moments of Shadow Creature, the injured god.
And now I had to kill it off.
Chapter 47
My physical body lay in a pile of unrecognizable debris. Solid, charred, lifeless. Destroyed time-tunnel gunk, I guess. I sat up. A gaping hole in a cracked tunnel wall loomed next to me. I couldn’t see what lay on the other side, but I imagined it to be the woods of Washington, with Mount Saint Helens close by.
I was inside a straight section of hazy tunnel. A blue light flickered in the air above my hand, then more random sparkles came into view, both near and far. On seeing them, I wanted to take back everything I had ever done to find the wounded god. They were the familiar blue lights that accompanied Shadow Creature’s appearance. But instead of reassuring me, their presence paralyzed me. How could I not be terrified? Shadow Creature had shaped a course to bring me to its injured tunnel self, in a place it didn’t belong—back before the beginning of existence. The fear I felt at that moment I would gladly have exchanged for the horror of being tracked by a jaguar or attacked by a pit viper or shot at by helicopter machine gun fire.
The lights blinked off, and I waited in silence, gradually calming myself with the memory that the injured god had always helped me.
Its voice filled the tunnel. “You came.”
“I made it, yeah. Man, oh man, what a trip.”
“I didn’t know if anyone had heard me. Thank you. You must be tired, but very brave and resourceful to have found me.”
It didn’t know... me? Then how and who? Man, these gods, they’re impossible to understand.
Maybe it had set up a path that I had followed or maybe our dreams had randomly intersected in a spectacular drama. Whatever the explanation, the bond that had developed between us seemed to have never been personal.
“Not brave, crazy.”
For a long time, I sat still, wondering what to do and waiting expectantly for instructions. Eventually I started moving around, one hand on a wall, feeling my way towards a glimmer of colors that had begun to appear.
The lighter tones coalesced into objects. In utter shock, I recognized where I was. I was looking through the door to the little garden and pool at the end of the hallway of Monster Alley Mansion. Flowers bloomed and water trickled from the fountain, but above it, a mass of boiling bubbles of something black and gooey swirled in place of the heavens. Stars of burning dust spun with what might be described as a light that only old gods of the void could have dreamed up. Strangely tentacled organic energies moved slowly amid the pre-celestial mix, leaving grooved trails, etched into whatever that was up there. Sky? Soup? The underside of a mushroom?
I shuddered, thinking I hadn’t even really seen anything that remotely fit how I interpreted it. I felt my mind had lacked the ability to comprehend what I had looked out upon. Struck blind and dumb by the witnessing of the great nothing before time, my faculties of perception scrambled to place images of a indescribable reality into an understandable context.
I wasn’t anxious to test myself in that environment, so I turned and worked my way back to where the front door would have been. A door existed, but it didn’t have the fine glass, wood, and st
one of the one I was familiar with. Damn, I thought I heard traffic honking, horses neighing, trees snapping in a strong wind, monstrous animals roaring, water lapping, waves crashing, the grinding and crunching of rocks, the earth whistling and crying like all the slamming and spitting of time was jammed together just inches away on the other side of that door. I wasn’t going out there either.
This is too real, man. The Shadow God wounded at the edge of nothing before the beginning of time. What am I doing here?
It was my hand that steered me into action. It had been throbbing constantly since my arrival in this ruination of a time tunnel. My fingers began to probe at my surroundings.
Feeling the wall, a clear picture of the artistic masterpiece that had adorned the hallways of the mansion leaped into my mind.
I’m here to heal the tunnel.
My fingers flicked.
Colors flowed from my hand, flaring with a rainbow radiance. I dotted my index finger experimentally onto a section of the shadowed tunnel wall. The first brushstroke. It portrayed a minuscule speck of sand.
I patted and rubbed and doodled with one finger, multiple fingers, my palm, developing a technique. I finally settled on brushing large impressionistic swaths with a sweep of my hand, then working over the same area with tiny finger strokes to render meticulous details of underground layers of rock and mud. Mind-boggling, soul-satisfying portrayals of crystalline wonders, hardened granite, limestone caverns, ancient fossils, and roiling magma took shape before me.
The healing of the tunnel had begun.
Within each finely-tuned detail, the spirit of time flowed. In the texture of say, a seashell, I understood the paths of all its elements and how they arrived to shape and thrive and breathe and eventually crumble back to nothing.
My hand was on a route of discovery. It couldn’t get enough. The artist in me reveled in the technical precision and liberating exuberance flooding through every cell inside me and onto every inch of the walls. The healer could feel the gift of life each stroke blessed the tunnel with. Never had I drawn with such a flood of joy.
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 31