Conrad took the opportunity to flee, his flight guided by the intermittent flashes of lightning. The earth shook and groaned and cracks opened in the ground and raced along the walls and thick, choking dust billowed forth. The curses and cries of the combatants rose to a tumult and became the death cries of mighty beasts, the roaring of calving glaciers, of collapsing mountains. He caught his heel on a stone and pitched headlong into a chasm of hot, whistling wind and blackness edged in dull red fire—
—and found himself kneeling in the courtyard of his Vegas hotel. Only, not precisely his hotel and not the Vegas he knew, not by a long shot.
The building loomed dark and silent, a mausoleum beneath the glittering desert sky. The entire city lay motionless, silent and sepulchral. A breeze rustled a flag on a pole. The stars were not right. Brooding emptiness crushed down with the weight of the universe itself. Conrad’s face was wet and he realized he bled from his eyes and mouth and nose. His blood mixed with flakes of ash and rust, and it tasted of antiquity and ruin. The moon slowly pierced the horizon and hung there, the blazing ivory tooth of a cannibal god taking a bite of the world.
His enemies would follow once they finished squabbling. He had to keep running lest Drake find and kill him. The problem was, he doubted there was any place on the planet to hide. It’s a one-way trip, Imogene had said. Forward to the end, beyond the end to the beginning. There would be no return. Actually, there’d be a return, it would just require several hundred million years of evolution.
It all felt so malleable, the moon, the stars, the night itself. He covered his face and concentrated, and discovered that there was nothing a bit dramatic about folding space and time. He allowed his mind to fill with the blackness of the illimitable void that surrounds the specks of dust that comprise the cosmos, and from this heart of darkness he summoned an image of his sister, pure and crystalline. Her image persisted for a moment before it wavered and dispersed. His vision dilated and contracted simultaneously, impossibly. In Imogene’s stead, something awesome and terrible shuddered, a stirring from the cosmic depths. He glimpsed a reflection of his own form, grown monstrous, elongated, distorted, all encompassing. A mouth, his mouth, yawned like a thousand black holes, eating planets, constellations, light, its own tail.
Dread overwhelmed him as the earth gave way and he was suctioned into the cathode of the universe, reduced to his constituent particles and absorbed.
VI
Conrad crawled from the soup and curled into a fetal position, gasping and wet with slime. He eventually opened his eyes to a lambent sun directly overhead. His unreasoning terror receded by degrees, although it lurked and his heart beat too fast. He lay supine on a mossy atoll surrounded by shallow, blood-warm seas. Steam drifted from the water. The sky was apple green.
“Behold the empire of trilobites,” Imogene said. She gleamed. “Hard to believe there’ll be little hominids skulking in yonder caves an eon or two down the road. Then flint and fire and dogs and rats. The adoption of gods and devils. Then, revenge, baby. Fiery, gory revenge. It’ll be great.”
“Something to look forward to,” Conrad said. He shivered violently, taken with a sudden chill. Contemplation of deep geological time wasn’t doing much to curb the fear in his heart, the wooziness of his brain. Nor did his sister’s dark smile lend him comfort. “I don’t know why I’m thinking of frying pans and fires…”
Imogene beamed her sinister smile as she reached up and casually grasped the sun and turned it counterclockwise as if unscrewing a light bulb.
A night without stars rolled over the world.
In the darkness, Imogene laid her cool hand upon his brow and her nails only dug in a little. She said, “Shall we begin?”
Table of Contents
Chapter One
I
II
III
Interlude
Chapter Two
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
Interlude
Chapter Three
I
II
III
IV
V
Interlude
Chapter Four
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
The Light is the Darkness Page 14