by Jeffrey Ford
There were all manner of terrible noises, sucking and gagging, the breaking of bones, the slosh of blood, and when I opened my eyes to look, Brisden had been reduced to a formless bag of flesh lying on the bench. The creature belched and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his suit.
I nudged Anotine in order to get her attention. I wanted her to run for the portal while I made a foolish attempt to subdue Below’s walking death. When she did not move or turn to look at me, I realized that she was in shock.
“Anotine,” I whispered, and tapped her cheek lightly.
She didn’t move, but continued staring in the direction of the bench. Looking again at the Delicate, I now saw him looking directly back at us. I tried to crouch as low as I could, and I put my arm around Anotine as if this would serve to hide her.
The creature’s broad mouth broke into a smile. “Hello, there,” he said, and rose from the bench. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you two. I have a secret to tell you both.”
22
As the Delicate moved toward us, I broke from the shadows behind the fountain in an attempt to draw him away from Anotine.
He had only taken two steps before I came at him, walking quickly, spear in hand.
“Have you tried the fruit?” I asked.
“I couldn’t possibly,” he said. “I’ve just eaten.”
I lifted the spear in both hands and lunged at him, thinking I could keep him at a distance. He smiled at me and continued to advance.
“Stay back,” I yelled, and lunged again.
“An impressive maneuver no doubt,” he said. “I think we are going to get along famously.”
In another step, he would have been close enough to wrap those rubbery fingers around my throat. I aimed for his head and threw all of my weight behind the weapon. That jab should have put the steel tip directly through his left eye, but his head simply flopped to the side, like a dead fish, at the last possible second, and I missed him completely. At the same time, his hand came up and grabbed the shaft of the spear.
“Let me hold that for you,” he said, and nonchalantly ripped the weapon from my hand.
I backed away from him as his head returned to an upright position. He dropped the spear, and it clanged against the pavement.
“Anotine,” I yelled, and looked over my shoulder to see if she had heard me. She remained crouched in the shadows. When I turned back to the Delicate, somehow he was there, right in front of me, though I had never heard him move.
“Rest now,” he said, his eyes like stones, his stinking breath all over me.
I didn’t have the chance to react. His arm moved like a whip, and his fist caught me right beneath the jaw. My head snapped back with the impact, and I fell to the ground, landing on my side. I felt no great pain, but I was stunned, unable to move my arms or legs. Consciousness was a tenuous thing, but I managed to hold onto it. Struggling to move my head, I looked over to see the Delicate standing above Anotine. He reached his hand down to her as if she were a child.
“It’s time to go now,” he said in a soothing voice, coaxing her to stand.
I opened my mouth and tried to yell her name, but it came as a rasping whisper. His strategically placed blow had momentarily paralyzed me, and now that some feeling was beginning to return to my limbs, all of my muscles were twitching like mad. It took the greatest effort to roll onto my stomach and lift myself to my knees.
“Come now,” he said to her, and reached for her hand.
I judged from the slowness of my movements that I would never revive in time to help her. A great anger surged through me but did little to hasten my recovery.
Then Anotine suddenly burst from her crouch with a terrific grunt, swinging the butt end of the spear around and catching the Delicate on his pointed chin. The creature was knocked back two steps. As he worked to regain his balance, she flipped the spear around and jabbed him in the right shoulder, retrieved it, and jabbed again in the same spot.
“That will put a damper on my day,” he said, his smile never fading.
Before she could attack him again, he had his hand around her back and had grabbed a handful of hair. His thin arm twisted unnaturally like a wet towel being wrung out and with this spiral motion brought her ear up to his mouth. With his free hand he relieved her of her weapon as easily as he had taken mine.
No matter how hard I worked to stand, I could not. The best I could accomplish was to crawl forward and watch as he attached himself to the side of her head, covering her ear. Anotine struggled wildly, but she could not break free. She called to me, and her eyes looked down into mine. I did not want to watch, but I couldn’t look away.
“Don’t,” I yelled, my full voice returning, echoing through the enclosure. To my astonishment, the Delicate released her hair and stepped away from her.
“Oh, my,” he said, and the wriggling fingers of both hands clasped above his stomach. His enormous head again flopped to the side and his mouth opened, releasing a belch that was laced with Brisden’s babble. A trickle of silver fluid seeped out from between his fingers. We watched as liquid mercury ate its way like acid through his stomach and shirt. It came from a hundred tiny openings that quickly grew together into a huge wound and spilled onto the pavement. Swirling designs full of life puddled at his feet.
“My apologies,” he said, no longer smiling. He staggered toward us a step, then fell forward, that enormous head losing its battle against gravity.
Anotine ran to me and helped me to my feet. I was still somewhat weak, but I managed to stand on my own.
“Brisden knew what he was doing,” she said as she put her arms around me.
I drew her close and held her tightly, closing my eyes. “I wish I did,” I said.
“Cley, listen,” she said.
Now that the threat of the Delicate had been canceled there was room for a new fear, and I was able to concentrate on the sound of the disintegration. It had increased from an annoying background hum to an obvious roar. I looked up and noticed that the stars had vanished and the sun would soon be up.
“The wood must be completely gone,” she said, “perhaps the field, too.”
“We’ve got to move quickly,” I said. “Where is the scalpel, the Lady Claw?”
“I dropped it behind the fountain,” she said as she let go of me and went in search of it.
I walked over to the Delicate and, using my foot, flipped him onto his back. Two steps behind him I noticed the puddle of liquid mercury, which was eating its way down into the stone of the pavement. Just before it seeped out of sight, I was able to distinguish a remarkable scene coalescing from its animated lines. The images I saw were of a young man standing beside a tall transparent block of what might have been ice. Embedded within that block was the figure of a woman. I quickly bent low to get a better look, and right before the silver tableau sank out of sight, it came to me that the woman was Anotine.
“Are we to take his head?” she asked, holding the scalpel out to me.
It was difficult, but I recovered without letting on how bewildered I was by what I had just seen. “Yes,” I said, “the head.”
I took great pleasure in separating the Delicate’s head from his body. The precision of my cut, the clean circularity of it, proved this. I only wished I had been able to do it while he was still alive.
“No blood,” said Anotine, looking over my shoulder as I worked.
“Where do you think everything went when he ingested Nunnly and Brisden?”
“Away,” I said, not wanting to divulge my theory that the Delicate had contained somewhere within him the same phenomenon of disintegration that was dissolving the island. “Where do ideas go when we discard them?” I wondered to myself, and discarded the idea as it became clear to me that the Delicate’s spine did not grow up into the neck.
“Look here,” I said. “This explains how he could drop his head so quickly to either side.”
“Beautiful,” she said, “but don’t we have to return to my r
ooms before we go to the tower?”
“Why?” I asked.
“The green liquid from the Fetch,” she said. “How else will we find the antidote?”
I had forgotten all about that part of the plan. “Harrow’s hindquarters,” I said. “As if things aren’t complicated enough.”
Even free of the body that head must have weighed more than forty pounds. When I first attempted to lift it, I nearly pulled my arm out of its socket. Using two hands, and grabbing it just beneath the chin, I managed to lift it off the ground. I leaned it awkwardly against my stomach as if toting a small boulder, and took short, halting steps toward the portal in the wall.
After squeezing the oversize cranium through the opening and out of the garden, Anotine suggested I use the creature’s braids to strap it to my back, making it easier to carry. She helped me make that adjustment, and then we were off, moving as quickly as possible toward her place. When I looked over at her, it appeared she was yelling words of encouragement to me, but it was impossible to tell, so deafening was the noise of the island’s demise.
Backtracking past the fountain of the pelican and around the corner to the spot where Nunnly was attacked, we were brought up short by the obvious absence of half the staircase from which Anotine had fired the last shell from the signal gun. Although she had been in the lead, she now stepped back next to me and put her arm on my shoulder. Leaning in toward my ear, she shouted, “It’s here,” and pointed.
It suddenly became clear to me, the rushing loss of pavement and architecture as it eddied away into twisters of dust and then into nothing. Beyond the quickly diminishing steps of the stairs, there was only blue sky. Her rooms were unquestionably gone, and it was clear that the green liquid from the Fetch should instantly be dropped from the plan. The island was a rapidly diminishing circle, and the advance of the nothing moved inexorably toward the Panopticon like a noose tightening around a neck.
Anotine led the way to the doors at the base of the tower. The weight of the Delicate’s head in addition to the outlandish exertions I had already suffered through the night combined to reduce my running speed to an uninspired pace. I had run like this before in nightmares—filled with fear, giving my all, only to make a snail’s progress. As I staggered up stairs, across terraces, through alleyways, the nothing howled in pursuit, less than a hundred yards behind.
At one point, after reaching the top of what was to be the final set of stairs, I tripped and fell under the weight of the head. It was lucky that Anotine chose to look back at that moment, because if I had had to rely on calling her to my rescue, she never would have heard me. I struggled to get to my feet, but even with the threat of annihilation, I could no longer lift the weight. She understood my predicament, and without speaking pulled the head off my back and slung it across her own. With the drag of the hideous cargo gone I was able to continue. Whatever time we lost to my mishap we made up by the speed with which we now proceeded. I could run, and she stayed a few steps ahead of me, advancing with incredible stamina. I remembered the doctor telling me, “It would be a mistake to underestimate Anotine’s strength.”
The journey to the gate seemed so inordinately long with so many twists and turns, I thought more than once that Anotine had forgotten the route and we were lost. Although the Panopticon was readily visible from every point of our approach, it never appeared to get any closer. Just as I was considering catching up to her to get her attention, we rounded the corner of a building and our destination was in front of us. At the end of the long corridor we had entered stood the two massive doors that gave entrance to the tower that loomed immense and unsympathetic to our frantic efforts.
When we finally stood in front of the doors, it came to me that I really had no reason to believe that merely holding the Delicate’s head up would cause the mechanism in the emblem to allow us to gain entrance. Though I searched my memory, I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I thought something so simplistic would work in such a complicated world. At this point, though, there was no alternative. I helped Anotine remove the head from her back. Setting it down for a moment, we each took a side. Then, on the soundless count of three, just my reading her lips, we hoisted the thing high and held it up to the emblematic eyeball, one-half of which had been rendered on each of the separate doors.
We waited for something to happen, and in that stretch of time it was all I could do to prevent myself from considering how we would save ourselves even if the doors were to spring open and we were immediately to discover the antidote. There was an extremely slight possibility that Misrix might appear and swoop me away to our reality, but either way, Anotine would soon cease to exist.
After it was clear nothing was going to happen with the current position in which we had situated the head, we began lifting it and lowering it to different heights in order to find the exact place where the Delicate’s eyes might have been had I kept the body intact. The process we went through, though frustrating, was clear proof of the connection Anotine and I shared, because without the power to speak, and at that point not even bothering with speech, we remained always in synch with our movements, as if sharing one mind.
Eventually my strength gave out, and we were forced to rest. As we placed the head on the pavement, I turned and noticed that the disintegration had just entered the corridor that led to the doors. We now had mere minutes to find a way inside the tower. Along with the onrushing nothing came an incredible wind caused by the violence of all that memory matter being forgotten. The fear was instantly upon me, and I could not take my eyes off the wave of disaster and the calm blue sky behind it.
That was when Anotine struck me on the shoulder in order to get my attention. When I looked over to her, she had, still supporting the head, stepped around to the front of him, and with her thumb and middle finger lifted the closed lids of the creature’s eyes. The nothing was twenty yards away when we hoisted the Delicate’s head again to a place just a few inches above my own. Instantly, a green light similar to that which had emanated from the Fetch shot out of the emblem on the door. The gradually widening beam struck the open eyes of our trophy, and the doors slowly began to part.
Once it was possible to gain access, we lowered the head and, with a coordinated heave, tossed it behind us. So close were we to the dissolution that the last remnant of the Delicate did not land on pavement but went over the ever-diminishing edge of the island in a mile-long fall toward liquid mercury. We did not stop to watch its descent, but ran forward into the dark opening of the Panopticon.
23
“It’s as empty as the Fetch’s head,” I cried, as my eyes adjusted to the shadowed interior. The light that streamed in through the portals set intermittently along the vertical length of the tower was enough to show me that there were no objects waiting to be deciphered. The inner base of the Panopticon was merely a round floor, in the exact middle of which began a spiral staircase that wound its way toward the dome a hundred feet above.
“What now?” asked Anotine, breathing heavily.
As soon as the words had left her, the circular wall around us began to dissolve. Tiny holes were forming and light shot through them in a confusion of bright beams. It was clear that soon these holes would join together to form the absence of a wall.
“Up,” I shouted, and we made for the stairs. As my foot touched the bottom step, the doors we had worked so hard to breach disappeared, and the nothing began to creep across the floor toward us.
The fatigue that had earlier slowed me in our retreat to the tower was now thoroughly forgotten. If we were to rest for a moment, the world would slip away beneath us, and the glorious dive into the silver ocean that I had once imagined would become a reality.
We scrabbled ever upward around the twirling metal beanstalk that was the stairs, while beneath us we could see the nothing climbing just as quickly, negating the steps we had trod only seconds before and vanishing the walls of the tower as it followed us toward the dome. Beneath all this was an
unobstructed, breathtaking view of the glimmering ocean a mile away. The wind was so fierce at times that if there hadn’t been a banister along the outer edge of the steps, I might have been blown off like a handkerchief.
The climb seemed both endless and pointless, and I could hardly catch my breath as we turned the tight circles in our ascent. Anotine was a few steps ahead of me, and I had the feeling she could have gone faster, but was regulating her speed to make sure I was safe.
As we approached the halfway point, I looked above and could see that there was a small landing illuminated by light from one of the portals. We came up through a hole in the floor of the landing, and Anotine didn’t stop. I had no intention to, either, but as my eyes came level with it, I noticed that on a circular shelf, which defined the edge of the landing, were positioned a series of hourglasses, each separated by only a few inches. Without thinking, I leaped off the stairs, bounded over to the closest one, and grabbed it. The entire procedure took less than five seconds. I turned and headed back for the stairs, and then with a sick feeling realized that the nothing was upon me. The landing was coming apart. I lunged for the steps, trying to grab the banister in order to pull myself back on course, but I missed. Instead, I felt a hand clutch tightly to my wrist. I don’t know how she managed it, but with one powerful tug and a fluid swinging motion, Anotine placed me back on the next step just as the twenty or more hourglasses fell away toward the ocean.
I didn’t need any extra incentive at that point to move faster. With the hourglass cradled in my arm, I bounded two steps at a time. When I thought my heart was about to explode, I looked up and saw an aperture in the floor of the dome, like an open trapdoor.
Anotine reached it and jumped through, and I was no more than a second behind her. As I hit the floor inside the dome, I rolled over and kicked the trapdoor shut. I let the hourglass tumble out of my hand as I found Anotine, and we entwined each other in a vise-like embrace, our bodies heaving in syncopation. I could feel her heart pounding against mine as I closed my eyes and waited to fall.