by Damien Love
Father. It worked! . . . Did it work?
Zia’s voice sounded inside Alex’s head, horribly intimate.
Yes. Alexia. I am well. All is well. The tall man removed his hard white mask, letting it drop without a sound. The smooth skin of his face practically glowed. Silver-black hair shone thickly as he swept it back from his high forehead. Alex knew that his father would have looked very much like this man. He tried to stop thinking about that.
Zia ran and hugged the tall figure. He patted her head.
Well done, Hans. The man looked at Beckman. A perfect incantation under less than perfect circumstances. You learned well. We must see about getting you out from your exoskeleton soon. Too much longer, and you may never be able to remove it.
Beckman smiled and pulled back his coat collar and bright polka-dot scarf. The wounds in his neck were gone. The tubes connecting him to his robotic body had fused seamlessly with the skin. Already too late, I think. Passing through the gate has . . . healed things together, ha-ha. But I like this body. I like being strong.
The tall man pursed his lips quizzically, then nodded, before turning to Alex.
And, Alexander. You are with us. As it should be. Taking your father’s place.
Alex opened his mouth to speak and found he couldn’t. He tried thinking a reply and sending it out, wondering if they would hear. No. I’m not with you. I’ll never be with you. My dad would never have been with you.
The tall man’s smile broadened sympathetically. Well. We knew your father better than you ever did, child. As for you: we shall see. There is lots of time to come. For the moment, we shall treat you as a guest, if you behave like one. But first, we must complete. Come.
He turned and strode beyond the corner. Zia and Beckman hurried after him.
A few seconds later, Alex followed. There was nowhere else to go.
He found them standing only a step around the curve, staring in wary confusion at what lay just ahead. The path simply ended at another sheer cliff wall. And there, with his back to them, crouched a gray-headed figure, pressing his hands to the rock, as if searching for a hidden doorway. He wore a heavy purple cloak, intricately embroidered with tiny black writing much like that Alex had seen glowing around the gate.
Who— Alex thought, before Zia could signal him to stop.
The man whipped around, wild-eyed.
What manner of devils are these now? He started moving his hands frantically, tracing strange signs. Back, I say, or— The warning dissolved into a long, convoluted singsong, rhyming lines of words Alex could not catch.
The tall man stepped forward, hands aloft, palms up. Hold, please, brother. Peace. Alex could see him thinking, fast and calm. Then: Could you really be the master who crafted the Shadow Gate of Boll?
The stranger paused and regarded Alex’s great-grandfather with a combination of fear, suspicion, and pride. Aye, creature. I am he.
The tall man dropped his hands in a placating gesture. Then you have been held here many years, friend. So. Let us help you now get free.
The cloaked man scowled, angry again. Seek not to confound me, demon. I passed through my gate but seconds ago. I wait now only for my men to call me through. He lifted his hands, forming clawlike shapes, pointed toward them.
The tall man dropped to one knee. Hold. Please. I know you are mighty. I have studied your book and know it is great. I am a fellow student of those same arts. I have other lessons I can share. Some of the high secrets and some of the low. My own discoveries and inventions. We should join together. Your men betrayed you, friend, abandoned you. They sealed you in and pulled your gate apart behind you in fear. We have built it once more, by your design. But hear me: many hundreds of years have passed since you walked through that portal.
They fell into a tense stand-off. The old gate-maker glared at them, keeping his hands held in their strange and oddly threatening gesture, but there was an uncertainty in his gaze, as though he was trying to remember something and couldn’t.
Alex glanced nervously out from the path. The empty white plain below, the dark woods far beyond. He had a distinct feeling something had changed down there. He stepped closer to the edge, peering harder.
Betrayed . . . The cloaked figure lowered his hands slightly. Hundreds of years?
Gazing over the landscape, Alex’s eyes widened. Wait, he thought, urgently. Look . . .
Zia spun. Shut up.
Alex shook his head and pointed. Look.
The blackness along the horizon. He had taken it for some vast forest. But now he saw: it was creeping closer—still a great distance away but coming fast. As he stared, he began to see the tangled darkness consisted of countless figures, running furiously in their direction. Now some of the creatures seemed to stretch out wings and take flight.
Things! Zia thought at him, with a grin. Then, glancing again at the approaching wave, she pursed her lips in a pensive frown. Father—
TAP-TAP—TAP.
The sudden knocking sounded huge and hollow, booming from within the cliff behind the gate-maker. As they all stared, the shadow of the gate began to materialize, appearing in the rock face like a developing photograph.
Curse your trickery, creature. The gate-maker had an exultant, furious look. My men call me now!
The tall man stood. No. It is my man, and he calls for us.
Die, vile entity. The cloaked figure twisted his hands violently in opposite directions. The tall man gasped and staggered, clutching painfully at his chest. Zia sprang for the gate-maker as Beckman shot two fat white fists at him, wrapping his hands in wire. Blue light crackled back along the coils, causing Beckman to arch his back in a long spasm. The tall man straightened painfully, lifting his cane.
The four of them started fighting in a flailing, struggling scrum.
They crashed into Alex, almost sending him over the edge. He backed up, looking from them to the ocean of figures seeping across the plain, the shapes hurtling through the air, getting closer.
He looked to the gate made of shadow. It was fully there now: sharp, solid black. Already, a whirling tunnel of light was growing within it.
Nowhere else to go.
Alex watched the fighting figures blocking the thin path between him and the gate. Every few seconds, as they lurched back and forth, there was just enough space at the edge for him to squeeze by. He poised himself, then darted forward.
As he shoved past, Beckman knocked into him, causing his right foot to slip over the precipice. Alex stumbled. He refused to fall. He drove down hard with his left foot and used his broom handle like a cane to drag himself forward, and then he was past them, and he was jumping into the swirling light, and there was a faint voice calling him, growing louder, guiding him, and he grabbed at that voice like a lifeline and pulled himself on.
XXXV.
THE IMP
And then he was falling forward, shocked by the rush of air in his lungs and a suddenness of darkness and cold. The voice was gone. There was a curious, blaring sound, high and tinny, and a flicker of flame.
But Alex clung to his racing thoughts. He knew von Sudenfeld was waiting beyond the gate, probably the bald man, too. He’d have only one chance to get past them. But he had surprise on his side.
Still blinded by the dark, Alex started screaming and lashing out wildly with his broom. He felt it connecting with a satisfyingly solid blow and heard a gasp of shock and pain. He kept swinging as his eyes adjusted to the faint light.
It was not the scene he had expected.
Before him on the rocky ground, groaning and holding a hand to his head, lay a young man of around nineteen, with long dark hair, a ratty mustache, and a startled expression. Sitting behind him were five other teens, three boys, two girls, similarly attired in T-shirts, jeans, greasy hair, and astonished looks. They held hands around a small fire and gawped at Alex in fearful si
lence, with the air of children caught doing something they shouldn’t. Empty beer cans and coiled climbing ropes lay around them. A cigarette dropped as one girl’s mouth fell open, scattering tiny embers.
As he stared back, utterly perplexed, Alex dimly realized he recognized some of the band names on their T-shirts. The noise in the air was a frenetic heavy metal guitar solo, screaming from a battered old boom box.
“Was habe ich getan? Verzeih mir,” the boy on the ground whispered. “Verzeih mir!”
They were on top of a flat, very high rock that jutted out like a balcony over a sea of black trees. The woods below spilled thickly away down a steep slope. Off to the right, beneath the full moon, the tiny lights of a little town twinkled against surrounding miles of darkness. In other circumstances, the view might have been enchanting. Alex stole a glance behind. He could just glimpse the gate’s quivering outline.
“Get away from here!” he yelled at the group, who still regarded him with dumbstruck awe. “Run!” He glanced around wildly. No sign of von Sudenfeld.
“You speak . . . English?” the boy on the ground said weakly. “Forgive me. Please. We were only . . . fooling. I did not mean to summon you . . . Do you all speak English?”
“What?” Alex thought he detected a faint tremor beneath his feet.
“Well . . . demons . . . imps. Whatever you are. Forgive me. We always heard the stories about this place. That the witches summoned you here. But we never believed, we were just joking about it. Please, you must forgive us.”
“Yes. Okay. Right. You’re all forgiven. But only if you get away from here right now. I’m very, eh, very upset at being . . . disturbed.” Alex wagged his fist at them and stomped a foot. As he did, the rock quaked under him again. This time, the others felt it, too. They exchanged fearful looks.
“Be GONE!” Alex thundered, shaking his broom in the air. There came a glaring blast of blue-white light from behind him and he spun to see one of Beckman’s fake fists bursting from the darkness. The white hand swung at nothing, then disappeared through the gate again. When Alex turned back, the last two teens were disappearing on their ropes over the edge of the rock.
“Forgive us!”
The music ended as the tape in their machine ran out. A second later, there came a low, distant breaking sound. Not from below this time.
Directly above, a thin line of white-blue light now shone through the clouds, as if a crack of daylight were breaking into the night. As Alex watched, transfixed, the crack lengthened, ripping across the sky in a jagged, sinister diagonal. From miles away, he could just see another glinting path of light tearing toward it, on a course to meet as one. He remembered his grandfather drawing a diagonal line on the map. The Kandel mountain at one end. The ruined castle at the other.
“Fault line,” Alex whispered.
The rock beneath him groaned, shifted, settled. He stared at his feet, at the landscape around him. With a slow, horrifying sense of realization, he recalled the story told by the climbers on the Kandel:
“At the very top, there used to be a . . . great, massive black rock that hung out. They called it die Teufelskanzel—the Devil’s Pulpit . . . Now, in 1981, you see, the Devil’s Pulpit suddenly disintegrated overnight. Tons and tons of rock . . . it all just came falling down . . .”
Before he could recall any more, he was flattened by Zia, who came flying through the gate and crashed into him as if she had been thrown. They collapsed in a tangle together.
“Where’s Willy?” she said, sitting up and glancing rapidly around. “What did you do?”
“I don’t think he’ll get here for a while yet,” Alex managed to croak.
“Eh?”
The rock was shaking steadily now. Alex could hear a hard rain of pieces falling from the edges. The rip in the sky was breaking open, and there were things moving up there, beyond the sky, flying things. Shafts of blue-white light slanted down across the landscape. He lurched as the mountain quivered horribly again.
“There’s all sorts of monstrous things in there now.” Zia nodded urgently toward the gate. “We need to help Father, get him out.”
“But we can’t stay out here!” Alex gestured frantically. “This whole part of the mountain is about to collapse. I think we’ve . . .” He fought to catch a breath and get his head around what he was going to say. “We’ve come out into 1981.”
Zia frowned, then dismissed it. “Close enough. Just out by four decades or so. Considering we were aiming across all eternity, rabbit, that’s like hitting a bull’s-eye.”
“No, but look!” Alex pointed at the fracture growing above them and tried to straighten his scrambled thoughts. “That . . . crack. It’s running from here to the castle. But you opened the gate in . . . the future. I mean, I think the crack is running from here in 1981, to the castle in our time. Maybe even back to the magician’s time, too, hundreds of years ago, when he first opened it. All at once. It’s all breaking open at once across . . . time and space . . . I mean, it’ll swallow everything. Everything’ll be wiped out. We have to close it.”
“Oooh.” Zia clapped her hands. “A fracture in existence! You could be right, brainy bunny. That’s exciting, eh? The crack of doom!” She paused and fell silent. Her brow furrowed as the rock swayed sickeningly to the side then slid back again. Zia looked seriously around them, taking in the increasingly apocalyptic scene. Turning to Alex, she considered him curiously.
“Here.” From her pocket, Zia pulled the flier Alex had previously used. She frowned at its mangled wings, then fished in her coat and produced a tiny silver hammer. Holding the little robot to the rock, she quickly battered the wings straight, then thrust it at Alex. “Looks like we’ll need to give you this.”
“What?”
“Well. There’s things to fight in there. Help or don’t help. You won’t be much use, anyway.” She moved toward the gate, staring at it impatiently, hands on hips.
Alex looked helplessly at the flier in his hand. “I don’t have any hair to give it,” he said.
“You’ve got a headful, idiot.”
“Oh.” Alex pinched a lock between his fingers, braced himself, and ripped it out. He fitted it inside the machine as carefully as he could with the world collapsing. “How do we go back through the gate?”
“I call, and I think we have to wait for someone to open it from the other side.”
“You think?”
“Stop whining. Something’ll turn up. I’ll call them.”
Alex looked around as she started chanting. The rock bucked beneath them. The crumbling sound was constant as the great crack in the sky yawned wider, brighter.
A sudden thought struck him. If he really was somehow standing in 1981, as he felt certain he was, then his father was still out there in the world somewhere, still just a boy, several years younger than Alex himself.
He staggered as another tremor pounded the mountain and Zia was thrown against him. They stood in a fearful embrace as half of their rock platform simply sheared off and fell away, leaving them perched atop a slender column that teetered alarmingly. Zia shook him off and began singing louder.
Alex turned back to his thoughts. He had minutes left, perhaps seconds, and so he would use them to think about this: his dad, a kid out there, safe somewhere, far away. At least until the chasm in the heavens widened farther.
Maybe, Alex thought, if he had worked it out a little sooner, he could have gotten himself down from this place alive. Maybe the crack would have been closed somehow, and he could have found his father, eventually. Maybe. And then maybe . . . then maybe what?
“Alex!”
The desperate voice pulled him back into the moment. Alex looked to the vague gate. Kingdom was leaning through, reaching out, light fizzing around her. Zia was already scrambling past her, vanishing to the other side again. Kingdom scowled after her, then waved her hand fr
antically.
“Come on!”
The ground fell away as Alex grabbed her hand. He swung there for a second as the last of the crag beneath him collapsed, tons of rock falling like a booming black waterfall. He saw his abandoned broom swallowed in the deluge. Dust rose up in a choking cloud.
And then he was being pulled up, through the light, into silence.
* * *
• • •
THE FIGHTING ON the narrow path was furious.
Alex’s eyes adjusted to the light to see the gate-maker being lifted into the air by . . . by something. It wasn’t a bird. More like a giant, single, fleshy wing thrashing fast. Yet it had claws and a beak. Perhaps two beaks. The cloaked, ancient figure seemed to be screaming. But there was no sound here. Then the creature and the man were gone, shooting up out of sight.
Alex’s grandfather stood shoulder to shoulder with the tall man, the two of them working together, slashing silently with their sticks to battle off an attack from a flock of similar flying beasts. Beckman balanced precariously at the edge of the precipice, his great metal arms struggling furiously with a number of writhing tentacles that reached up from below. Alex couldn’t tell if they were the limbs of some enormous entity down there, or vicious, wormy creatures themselves.
Zia stood clutching the plant pot, frowning furiously. Father?
Yes, child, he answered without looking.
We must go back.
The tall man paused in his fighting a fraction of a second. Certain?
Zia nodded.
Very well.
But that means we will not complete. Zia’s voice wavered. It will all reverse, and you . . .
I will have to find another way. He slashed at the air. A flier shot from Zia’s coat and jabbed at the wing menacing her father, driving it away. Kingdom leapt past Alex, rapier held high.
Ah, Alex, there you are! Alex’s grandfather’s voice rang brightly in Alex’s mind. I was just saying to Evelyn, perhaps we should get out of here. After you, son. He nodded back toward spot where the gate had first opened.