by Tad Williams
Terrified, she opened her eyes and looked down, saw !Xabbu's brown leg come down between hers, only his toes gripping the edge. Below them—the nothing, the silver nothing. His fingers arched and touched, and spread like a spider's legs beside her own clenched hand, and his other foot came down beside the first, leaving him perched between her heels on the sliver of stone path. For a moment, as his other hand touched and spread so that he leaned against her, just barely brushing against the skin of her back, his balance as fragile as a spiderweb, she had the thought that if she leaned backward they could both just fall away, swoop down into the pale mist like angels, and all the pain would be over.
"Hold your breath, my Beloved Porcupine," he whispered, his mouth warm against her ear. "Just for a little moment. Please, please."
She closed her eyes again and clung, praying to anything and everything, tears running down her cheeks and neck. He moved his foot . . . his hand . . . his other hand . . . then his other foot, and he was not touching her anymore.
But if we're going to die, she thought, quietly, mournfully mad, I wish it could have been like that, together, together. . . .
She could hear him slowly edging along the shelf beyond her. "You must move," he called back quietly. "Everyone keep moving. It will do no good if I manage to get around but you are all still here. Follow."
Renie shook her head—didn't he know? Her limbs were locked, trembling. She was like a dead insect, her outside a rigid shell, her insides melted away.
"You must, Renie," he said. "The others cannot move until you do."
She wept a little more, then tried to make her hand unclench. It was a claw, hard and stiff. She slid it a few centimeters to one side, then struggled to make it grasp again. After a moment, biting her lip until it bled to keep her mind off the pain in her extremities, she slid her foot a tiny way along the ledge. Her leg burned like fire and her knee began to buckle.
"Keep moving," !Xabbu said from somewhere ahead of her. She stared at the black rock. Stephen, she told herself. He has nobody else. Help him.
She slid the other foot. The pain, although shatteringly bad, did not grow worse. She breathed through her nose and inched the other hand along, then started the whole horrible process again.
Renie risked a look to the side and wished she hadn't. !Xabbu had reached the place where the mountain bulged out, and was performing a terrifyingly intricate series of maneuvers—crouching to get his head beneath the worst of the outcrop, then moving sideways at a snail's pace, bent at the waist, with only his toes on the path and fingers resting lightly on the stone so he could keep most of his weight forward. As he moved, centimeter by agonizing centimeter, he made minute adjustments of balance, tilting head and shoulders a tiny degree here, an equally tiny degree there, moving slowly around the protrusion. Renie felt tears come again and wiped her burning eyes on her upraised arm.
!Xabbu vanished around the edge. She slid a few more steps, then reached the spot where the outward tilt began. She clung, knowing it was all pointless, waiting in dull horror for the cry that would mean he had fallen.
Instead, he spoke. "There is a place here."
It took a moment before she could calm the sob waiting to burst out. "What?"
"A place. A flat place. If you can only make it around the edge. It is a place to lie down, Renie! Hold on! Tell the others!"
"Liar." She gritted her teeth. She knew it had to be false—she would do the same herself, say anything to help the others find the strength to try to get around this horrible obstacle. "There's nothing but more of the same."
"I am telling you the truth, Renie." His voice was hoarse. "By the heart of Grandfather Mantis, I am telling you the truth."
"I can't make it!" she wailed.
"You can. Come as far toward me as you can. Lean to the side instead of back, to keep your balance. Try to reach your hand around to me. When you touch me, don't be frightened. I will hold your hand tightly and help keep you up."
"He says there's a place to stop on the other side," Renie told the others, trying to sound like she believed it. There was no reply, but she could see Sam Fredericks from the corner of her eye, feel the girl's exhaustion and panic. "A safe place. Just a tiny bit farther." She relayed !Xabbu's directions so the others would know what to do when they got there, not believing for a moment any of it would work, then slid a little closer to the outcrop. She leaned as !Xabbu had instructed, pushed her throbbing feet a little closer to the bump. For a moment she thought she had leaned too far, and only the stiffness of her limbs kept her from making a fatal grasp for a better handhold. She hugged the black stone tight, edged her left arm as far around it as she could, out of sight. . . .
. . . And something touched it. Despite !Xabbu's warning, the surprise was so great she almost lost her grip again, but the fingers around her wrist were tight and sure. She sidestepped again, having to lean back a little now as the stone bulged out above her, and suddenly she felt her balance shift back, back toward nothingness. She had only a moment to draw breath for the pointless reflexive scream, then her arm was jerked hard and she scraped along the stone. Her right foot slipped off the path, but the rest of her caromed out, swinging on the pivot of her other foot, and !Xabbu was there, still holding on with blessed, blessed strength as he flung himself backward into a wide cleft in the mountainside so that she tumbled in on top of him. He quickly dragged himself out from under her; a moment later Renie heard him shuffling back to the edge of the fold in the mountainside, calling to Sam, but Renie herself could only lie facedown on the floor and cling as hard as she had gripped the mountainside, rubbing her face against the precious horizontal stone.
She was dimly conscious of !Xabbu bringing the others in safely. Sam fell gasping beside her, whimpering at the cramping of her fingers and toes. A more stolid Jongleur followed and tumbled silently to the ground. Even as the adrenaline diminished and her heart began to slow, Renie suddenly realized that !Xabbu had gone back to the rim of the crevice, risking his life to help the brain-damaged Ricardo Klement to safety. She struggled to her knees, every muscle shrieking in protest, and crawled to the edge. !Xabbu was leaning out at an angle that made her heart begin triphammering again, talking slowly and softly to someone she could not see, his slender arm stretched out of sight around the outcropping.
"I'm behind you, !Xabbu." Her voice was a dry croak. "Do you want me to grab your hand?"
"No, Renie." His voice was muffled against the rock. "I need it where it is for balance. But if you held my leg, I would be grateful. Let go quickly if I ask."
As her fingers closed around his ankle he leaned out farther. Renie could only watch for a moment before having to shut her eyes. The sky's strange lack of depth did not prevent vertigo.
It's just as well T4b isn't here, she thought, the distracted thought keeping a greater terror at bay.
For a moment, as !Xabbu's muscles tensed beneath her touch and he leaned out even farther on his fingernail grip, she thought her pulse would explode in her chest. Then the naked body of Klement came wobbling around the edge of the stone and !Xabbu crouched and pulled backward, toppling onto Renie as he pulled Klement in on them both.
They all lay gasping for a while, until Renie found the strength to help !Xabbu away from the edge of the cleft, deeper into the dimple in the mountain's side. It was scarcely three meters to the place where Sam lay almost wedged into the back, but after that ribbon of trail the space seemed palatial.
Renie slept then, a brief dive beneath the surface of consciousness. When she woke, she dragged herself toward !Xabbu where he sat propped against the black stone and put her head against his chest, nudging until she found a spot in the hollow under his chin. The beat of his heart was soothing, and she realized she never wanted to let go of him.
"We're in trouble," she whispered.
He said nothing, but she could feel his attention,
"We can't go out on that trail again. There's nothing left of it."
She th
ought he drew breath to argue, but then she felt his head slowly nodding, the curve of his throat and jaw enfolding the line of her own skull like a cupping hand. "I think you are right."
"So what's left? We stay here until the thing dissolves out from under us?" She looked at Sam, as rigid as a catatonic, staring at her own hands. Jongleur too seemed lost in some inner world, all of them now wandering as distantly as Ricardo Klement. "What else can we do?"
"Wait. Hope." !Xabbu brought his arm up and drew her closer. His fingers rested lightly above her heart, on the upper slope of her breast. "We will be together, no matter what comes."
She burrowed even deeper against him, and realized that she wanted not just to be held, but to kiss him, weep against his face, make love to him. But not here. Not inches from slow-breathing Jongleur, not under Ricardo Klement's aquarium gaze.
And if not here, where? she thought with a brushstroke of sad humor. If not now, when? For it seemed fairly certain there was nothing left. Still, bone-deep weariness and the presence of hateful strangers had turned the thought grotesque. She would content herself with childlike pleasures, with being held, with falling asleep in what for the moment was as much safety as she could imagine.
"Tell a story," she murmured instead. "We need one, !Xabbu."
She felt his head turn slowly from side to side. "I cannot think of any stories, Renie. I am so tired. My stories are gone."
It seemed the saddest thing she had ever heard. Unseeing, she touched his face as sleep came and took her again.
Even after all the unreason she had experienced, all the visions and hallucinations, she came up out of the blackest, most unknowing depths into the active force of the dream and realized immediately that this was perhaps the strangest one yet.
Usually when she dreamed, she was the active one, even if those actions were frustrated; in some of the worst she was a helpless observer, a bodiless phantom condemned to watch over a life it could no longer enjoy. But this was different. This dream came at her, washing over her with the force of moving water, a river of experience that had swallowed her down and was rushing her along, battering her until she felt she might drown in it.
If there had been coherent images she might have found it easier to resist the terrible flow, to feel some tiny chance of control, but the whirling chaos roared over her and through her, unstoppably. Streaks of color, snatches of incomprehensible sounds, flashes of nerve-scraping heat and cold, it went on until she felt so overwhelmed that she could only pray for some sleep deeper than this terrible active dream, anything that would blank out the sensation, stop the terrible screaming input.
Death. The word registered only for a moment, like a headline on a gust-snagged newspaper. Death. Calm. Quiet. Dark. Sleep. In the uncontrolled anarchy of sensation, trapped on this brakeless thrill ride, it had a dreadful allure. But the life inside her was really very strong: when the darkness did come, it terrified her.
It was a cold, oozing dark, a clammy black static grip that, after the initial relief, was only slightly better than the surging horror it had replaced, for not only the swirl of images vanished, but most of her thoughts as well. Reality fragmented and disconnected, became a series of pointless movements that she realized were only the earlier discord stifled and slowed.
She floated in the midst of a living shadow. There was nothing but herself, surrounded by an unimaginable blackness. She could not think, not properly. She could only wait, while time or perhaps some incompetent impostor did its work.
The emptiness was aeons long. Even imagination died. Aeons long.
Then at last she felt something—a fluttering in the void, Oh, God, it was real, it was! Something distant, but actually separate from herself. No, many somethings, small and alive, tiny blessed warm things where before there had been nothing but cold.
She reached out eagerly, but the fluttering things darted away, frightened of her. She reached again and the presences retreated even farther. Her sorrow grew so large and painful that she was certain all that kept her coherent would burst and she would spill inside out into the darkness, disperse, collapse. She lay in cold misery.
The things returned.
This time she was careful, as careful as she could be, reaching out to them slowly, gently, feeling them in their terrible fragility. After a while they came to her without coaxing. She handled them with almost infinite caution, enfolded each one as gently as she could, a century between thoughts, a millennium between excruciatingly restrained movements. Even so, some proved too vulnerable, and with tiny cries they were no more, bursting in her grasp like bubbles as they gave up their essences. It tore at her heart.
The others flitted away, alarmed, and she was terrified, certain they would leave her forever. She called to them. Some came back. Oh, but they were delicate. Oh, but they were beautiful.
She wept, and the universe slowly convulsed.
The dream had been so deep and powerful and strange that for a long time she did not realize she had returned to consciousness. Her mind still seemed lost in lonely darkness: for almost a minute after she remembered her name, Renie did not open her eyes. At last some returning sensation in her skin and muscles pricked her and she unlidded, stared, then cried out.
Gray, swirling silver-gray. Flickers of light, the smearing of broken spectra, a fine dust of luminance . . . but nothing else. The shimmery cloudstuff that had girdled the mountain seemed to be all around her now, an ocean of silver emptiness, although she could sense something hard and horizontal beneath her. She was not bodiless—it was not a dream this time. Her hands crawled over her own flesh and to the ground on either side, a ground she could not even see. She was lost in a heavy, shining fog, everything and everyone else gone.
"!Xabbu? Sam?" She crawled a little way over the hard but curiously smooth invisibility beneath her, then remembered the edge of the crevice and stopped, fighting against complete panic. "!Xabbu! Where are you?"
An echo had been one of the few lifelike features that the degenerating black mountainside had retained, but there was no echo now.
Renie moved forward again, exploring with nervously twitching fingers, but even after she had crawled what must have been a dozen meters she had encountered neither the stone of the cliff face nor the open space at the crevice's rim. It was as though the mountain had just melted away around her, leaving her on some inexplicable tabletop in the glimmering fog.
She crawled another dozen meters. The ground she could not see was as smooth as something glazed in a kiln, but real enough to hurt her knees. She called her companions' names over and over into absolute silence. At last, desperate, she climbed to her feet.
"!Xabbu!" she shrieked until her throat was sore. "!Xabbu! Can you hear me?"
Nothing.
She walked a half-dozen careful paces, testing each footstep before setting it down. The ground was absolutely flat. There was nothing else—no precipice, no vertical stone slab of mountain, no sound, no light except the ubiquitous pearly gleam of the mist. Even the fog had no substance: it shimmered wetly but was not wet. There was nothing. There was Renie and nothing. Everything gone.
She sat down and clutched at her head. I'm dead, she thought, but outside the dream, the idea of death was not a soothing one. And this is all there is. Everyone lied. She laughed, but it sounded like something wasn't working properly inside her. Even the atheists lied. "Oh, damn," she said out loud.
A flicker of shadow caught her eye—something moving in the fog.
"!Xabbu?" Even as she spoke, she felt she shouldn't have. Hunted—they were all hunted now. Still, she could not smother the reflex entirely. "Sam?" she whispered.
The shape eased forward, resolving out of nothing like a magical apparition. She was prepared for something as bizarre as the setting; it took her a moment to recognize what it was that shared the silver void with her.
"I am . . . Ricardo," said the blank-eyed man. "Klement," he added a moment later.
CHAPTER 5
&
nbsp; The Last Fish to Swallow
NETFEED/NEWS: Church Refuses Exorcism for "Bogeyman"
(visual: child on bed in La Palotna Hospital)
VO: The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has refused the request of a group of close to three dozen Mexican-American parents to perform an exorcism on their children, who claim to have had identical nightmares about a dark spirit they call "El Cucuy"—the bogeyman. Three of the affected children have committed suicide, and several of the others are being treated for clinical depression. Social help agents say the villain is not a demon, but the medical result of too much time spent on the net.
(visual: Cassie Montgomery, LA County Human Services)
MONTGOMERY: "We can't trace the source yet, but I don't think it's a coincidence that most of these young people are latchkey kids and heavy net users. It seems pretty clear that something they've seen or experienced online is provoking these bad dreams. The rest I chalk up to garden-variety hysteria."
What's even more important," the guide said, smiling her professional smile from behind thick goggle-style sunglasses, "is that we now have healthy breeding populations of many threatened birds—the gallinule, or marsh hen, the roseate spoonbill, the Lousiana heron, and the beautiful snowy egret, just to name a few. Now Charleroi will take us into the deep swamp. Maybe we'll see some deer, or even a bobcat!" She was good at her job: it was clear she could manifest the same energy for that line every trip, day in and day out.
Not counting the guide and the young man nominally steering the boat, whose suntanned arms bore the serpentine traces of unignited subdermals and whose facial expression also suggested that some necessary light beneath the flesh had not been switched on, there were only six passengers on this slow weekday afternoon, a red-faced British couple and their small noisy son who was cutting at the duckweed with a souvenir lightstick, a pair of young married professionals from somewhere the the middle of the country, and Olga Pirofsky.