He relayed this information with perfect serenity, as if recalling the deeds of a villain in a cartoon. He pulled a blanket up over a sleeping man.
“If they are so bad, then why do you help them?” she asked.
“That’s part of justice too. See, they did bad things and they know that they deserve punishment, to even the scales before they’re judged. So they accept the punishment, see? But also they have me to help them, and that makes them better faster, but it also hurts them inside. Because they get kindness where they dealt out cruelty, and that hurts them, but it does good too.”
He looked up at her, and she knew he was evaluating her reaction.
“You’re doing a good thing,” she said. He looked away and moved on. “Who taught you to do this?”
“Janeiro.”
“Did you ever want to go back to the regular world? The world of the living people?”
“I asked about it, but Janeiro says I can’t. He says it will hurt people.”
He turned to look into the eyes of another spirit, and there was something about him, something familiar. It wasn’t his resemblance to his father or to her, as he was his own unique mixture of them both. His mouth was her mother’s, his ears were unfamiliar, perhaps coming from his father’s side. It was something else, something in the set of his jaw, his look as he tried to figure out what his patient required. She had seen him before. She was certain of it.
A great rumbling began far in the distance, then grew closer and shook the building violently. She instinctively put her arms around Luke, pulling him down to the floor. A water basin crashed to the floor, and a great cry went up among the spirits.
The shaking stopped and Luke stood, then reached to gently take her hand. She thought her heart might burst with the tenderness of the little gesture. She wanted to embrace him, to kiss his cheeks and hold him forever.
“The trumpet!” a spirit in the nearby bed yelled. “It sounds!”
But Felicia had heard nothing. The other spirits took up the cry, rising from their beds and hobbling toward the door, some dragging themselves along the floor. “The last day! It’s time!”
Luke led her through the spirits and outside where they saw spirits running, walking, gliding and flying. All headed in one direction. In the distance, lightning split the mottled purplish sky.
“I’ve never seen that before,” said Luke.
“It’s open!” murmured a nearby spirit. “The door opened. It’s time.”
“What’s happening?” asked Felicia, still holding his hand.
“They think it’s the final judgment.”
“And is it?”
He looked up at her, uncertain. He was so young, and she thought that no child should have to wonder about such a thing. But she was even more lost than he was. Two lost souls in the realm of the dead.
Other spirits appeared in the distance, clearly inhuman. Luke saw her watching them.
“I stay mostly in the area for people. But there are other places with other types of things.”
The human spirits crowded past, and Felicia was reminded of something, of animals fleeing a forest fire.
“I think we ought to go with them,” she said. “If it’s a way to get out of here, it might take us home.”
Chapter 39
Seamus watched as the spirits continued to come through into the cloister graveyard, one by one, and then in groups.
He turned on the machine again, trying to reverse what he had done to close the opening, but he had no success. The rip opened wider, revealing a blotchy purple sky spiked with occasional lightning. And still the souls came.
The novice crossed herself and pulled at Hazel’s arm. “We should go. We should fetch the priest.”
“I don’t think it will help,” said Hazel.
“I’m going to wake the sisters. We’ll send someone into town for the priest. Hold a moment. Are those your horses?”
Hazel said they were, then knelt to help Seamus reset the machine.
Without another word, the sister ran and untied the larger animal, Seamus’s mount, then leapt onto it. Seamus thought she must have been a farm girl with experience with her father’s plow horse, or perhaps the daughter of a landowner with a stable, for she handled the animal expertly, turning it and riding it at a full gallop, her woolen stockinged legs gripping its sides and her habit flying out behind her.
“A lass like that is wasted in a place like this,” said Seamus, twisting the knob to crank the power level up to maximum.
“Maybe she’s not,” said Hazel. “The outside world isn’t so kind to women as to men.”
They watched a group of spirits as they drifted away, in the direction of town, while another group came through, this one including people in clothing from centuries ago.
“It’s not working,” said Seamus in exasperation. “I can’t get it to work, and I don’t have time to recalculate the numbers.”
“I don’t think we can do anything, Professor. And it’s getting worse.”
The rip now was nearly as high as the cloister walls and was widening as well. They gathered up the machinery and hurried away. Now the spirits were coming through in groups of ten to fifteen, and though most were either thoughtful or confused, a few appeared angry and shrieked at the sky or shouted unintelligibly at one another. Their clothing became increasingly stranger, with women in trousers and some people wearing less than a typical person’s underclothes.
“We should go,” said Hazel, but halfheartedly. She craned her neck to see beyond the spirits who crowded and pushed through. Seamus understood her conflicting desires to run away or to see what was through the rip.
“You’re welcome to go,” he said. “But I want to see what this is. Oren said that in his world, this place was a temple for that goddess who walked with the dead, that he came through a shimmering doorway. And the air now at the edges of the rip is just like he described, just like the shimmering I saw at Jackson Square back home.”
A line of spirits tore past them, and Seamus put his arm out to shield Hazel, but he needn’t have as she leapt back, as nimble as a goat. Seamus hopped up on the low wall that surrounded the graveyard, getting a good look beyond the spirits. Hazel maneuvered her skirts and scrambled up beside him.
“My God,” she breathed. They could see clearly through the tear now, into the land beyond. “It’s hell.”
Seamus wasn’t sure what it was, but though it wasn’t any kind of paradise, it didn’t look like a place of eternal torment either.
In the distance stood an open iron gate at the top of a mountain pass. Souls crowded thick near it, pushing through, some climbing over each other. They poured down the mountain and raced across a wide gray field, straight toward the rip. Lightning flashed, blinding him momentarily. It had come from a place very close to the tear, but inside the other world. A great freezing wind picked up, whether from this side or the other, he could not say. It came from all directions, as if converging upon this very spot, and it whipped their hair and clothing. The air smelt of electricity and a coming storm.
A pack of souls screamed past, and Seamus lost his balance. Hazel grabbed him just as another group ripped into them, passing through them. The sensation was terrible, like an icy wind that pierced clothing and froze flesh, but internal, as if the very marrow of his bones was freezing and hardening into stone. The souls grew thicker as the main body of approaching souls was now arriving at the rip, screaming and howling, flying and running, some in joy and some in madness.
Hazel leapt down on the far side of the wall and pulled him with her. Together they huddled with their backs against the stones, sometimes touched by the passing souls and sometimes narrowly avoided. Their remaining horse shied and screamed, bucking and eventually pulling free of its tie and racing into the distance. Seamus mana
ged to crawl out to pull his equipment together and stow it in his bag, and twice they tried to run, but both times the souls were too thick, crowding the road, the fields and the graveyard.
Now and then there would be a space between souls and he could look up at the cloister where he saw the terrified faces of the nuns, disembodied pale ovals, peering down through the windows.
He and Hazel huddled together until dawn, and as the sun rose, his hopes died, for he had wondered if the souls might fear sunlight and the light of day. They were undeterred, though he noticed that there were fewer and fewer as time passed.
Despite Hazel’s objections, Seamus hopped back onto the wall. The line of souls had dwindled down to a trickle. But why? If they so clearly desired to escape that drab place, then why stop now? Surely there were more souls than just the few thousand they had witnessed.
A quarter of an hour later, he was able to walk up to the rip. A few souls still meandered toward the rip in the other world, but that wasn’t what caught his eye. A hundred yards away, coming across the field toward the rip, were two figures. They were solid, colorful and fully alive. The shorter one, a boy, he did not know. The woman he knew from his dreams.
“Professor!” shouted Hazel as he got close enough to the rip for the shimmering air to envelop him.
“It’s her,” he called out to Hazel. “The woman from my dream. Can you see her?” Hazel joined him just as a great dark shape filled the air over the distant mountain. It swept over the gate, moving faster than anything he had ever seen and down toward the pair on the ground. The woman moved to shield the child, and Seamus stepped forward. Two spirits slid past him and he saw other spirits coming now, inhuman, some large and some small. The large shape passed the woman and child, but another one, this one lumbering and huge, like a living thing of plants and earth, strode toward the pair.
“They’re alive,” he said to Hazel. “And they’re trying to get to us. We have to get them out.”
“No, no we don’t. They’re coming this way, see?”
They were, but at a painfully slow pace. The lumbering thing stopped in front of them, and they appeared to be speaking with it. He watched as the woman pushed the child behind her, protecting him.
“You stay here,” he said to Hazel and leapt through the door, running across the land, dodging approaching spirits, watching as the creature raised its vaporous arm, and the woman and child turned and fled.
The creature must not have wanted them too badly, as it turned toward him, toward the rip. The woman and child turned back, and they were close enough now for him to know for certain that he had never seen the boy before, but the woman’s face was well known to him. And from her look, his own was just as familiar to her.
“Professor!” called a voice far behind him, and he turned to see Hazel, his equipment bag over her shoulder and her skirts gathered in her hand, running toward them. The area behind her was empty, and it looked like no more spirits were traveling through the rip. He could still see the top of the cloister wall and the sky of his world beyond, though they were small and distant.
He raced toward the woman and child. “It’s you,” said the woman to Seamus once they had reached one another.
“I’ve never seen the spirits so upset,” said the boy.
“Come with me,” said Seamus. “I’ll get you out.”
He turned back. Was the rip smaller now, or was it his imagination? No, for as he watched, it contracted. He yelled for Hazel to go back, but even as she turned, it pulled closed, snapping shut like an eye.
Seamus tried his machine, but to no avail.
The boy, Luke, insisted that his mother sit and rest. She was pale and clearly exhausted. Her story was even more strange than her clothing and speech, a story that included being married to him, which Seamus found believable, and of giving birth to a child who was stolen away and kept in this land for ten years by one of the Twelve.
As he tried the machine again and again, attempting to recreate the rip with known coordinates, the four of them traded information, going over what they knew, where they had been and what they remembered. Something resembling the swapped tales of asylum inmates emerged.
“We should go back home to my rooms,” said Luke. “This place is dangerous for us. The dead are fascinated by us, and some are not so friendly.”
“I saw as much,” said Seamus, but the area was now empty. One of the halves of the gate at the top of the mountain hung crookedly, half ripped from its hinges. The other half lay on the ground.
Hazel was still fiddling with his machine, trying various combinations of settings and power levels. It had been hours, but she was a stubborn thing and had decided upon randomly trying varying settings based on luck and desperate prayer.
“Pack everything up,” he said. “We’ll try again from Luke’s safe place.”
“I think I’m close,” she said.
He helped Felicia to her feet. Hazel tried the machine again, and after a moment, the air shimmered for an instant but did not form a complete doorway. Seamus leapt to study the readings, then worked to adjust the machines, making tiny changes and studying the results each time. Hazel giving him instructions on what she had done, while he argued with her at the impossibility of it.
“This way!” Hazel turned a knob, changing the settings to ones that would never work. That was precisely why he had not tried them. The air shimmered and Felicia moved forward.
“No, don’t go near it!”
“I think it won’t open any farther for us,” Felicia said. “I think we can step through when it’s like this. I think I’ve done it before.”
“We don’t know where it goes.”
“What do your readings say?”
“I can’t make much of them. They’re similar to the ones from my world, but not quite the same.”
“We could all go,” said Felicia.
“I have to stay here,” said Luke. “Janeiro said.”
“Janeiro stole you and hid you,” said Felicia. “You belong in the world of the living, not the dead. Besides, Seamus here can close the rips that the void wyrms come through. I’m not leaving you here.”
“I’ll go first,” said Hazel, and before Seamus could react, she leapt up and stepped straight into the shimmering air, vanishing. He counted off fifteen seconds, checking the machine and keeping the power levels steady. At last, she returned.
“It’s our world,” she said, breathless. “But it’s very different. People were dressed like you, more or less.” She nodded to Felicia and Luke.
“That’s all we need to know,” said Felicia. “Anywhere is better than here.” She took Luke’s hand and stepped through. Seamus took the equipment he could while leaving the pieces that kept the rip open and followed Hazel through.
The place was a madhouse. Under their feet stretched a long wooden roadway running on raised pylons along a beach. The sun was bright and the place was overwhelming with a thousand colored electric lights, more than Seamus could imagine being in one place. Giant mechanical structures, one a great wheel with people in dangling gondolas, one a spinning contraption with seats on chains, all spun to a terrible cacophony of pulsing music.
“Thank God, we’re home,” said Felicia.
She was the only one pleased. Hazel studied the area with a look of mixed fascination and horror. Luke took a step back.
Thunder exploded overhead and people nearby ducked, as if it were a bomb. The air was humid and heavy, but cooled rapidly as a cold wind blew in from the sea.
“I don’t like this place,” said Luke.
Seamus had to agree.
Chapter 40
Elliot had always paid close attention to the weather. As a surfer, he knew the tides, and as a ship’s captain, he had learned about the sea’s currents, the seasons, the wind and the thou
sand things that could affect a ship’s course. So when he observed the wind, its quick change in temperature and direction and the way the sea became rougher, even this close to Santa Maria Island, he became uneasy.
He studied the clouds, dark and heavy with moisture. Everything felt like it was moving, not only physically, but in some other way, some deeper way. Things were moving closer.
Astrid appeared on deck, followed by Yelbeghen, wearing gaudy and ill-fitting clothing from the Luna Park gift shop. Astrid had told Elliot that the drake, a vain creature, always dressed well. Then he remembered the more important fact, that Astrid and the drake were alive and they had recently been in the realm of death. How could he have forgotten, even for so short a time? His mind felt like a wad of yarn, all wound into a big ball, impenetrable and thick.
Astrid said something, and he couldn’t remember what he answered, but he answered. Astrid glanced at Sister, and he knew immediately that his response had been off. He tried to remember what her question had been.
The air pressure felt higher, and he sensed the air pressing in on his skin. It went further than that. The whole world was pressurized, compressed, crushed together with something else.
He felt it first, in his mind, and then he saw it happen, half in the sky and half under the sea, the things all coming together. They were small at first, rocks, clouds, then they grew into mountains and great undersea formations. He dropped to his knees.
Worlds and worlds. So many skies! And the seas, all comingling, like the atoms of water were rainbow colored gumballs, all jostling together, vibrating, pressing in, moving through each other. Merging.
The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series) Page 137