He felt it, then: the first tug at his back, trying to peel him away, to halt his progress.
It only excited him. It was against rules more sacred than any mere sacrilege, his being here—laws laid down when the first stars had yet to coalesce, and the cosmos on this plane had been a seething ocean of quark-gluon plasma.
In aeons past, even he would have quivered at the thought of breaking such laws, and the retribution that would be sought by the Weaver’s servants. But all things came to an end, even the reign of gods.
A sliver of fear twinged somewhere down in his broken soul, but it was just a flicker, serving only to heighten his excitement. So long had he waited for this, to feel the power, to hold it in his hands and know that he had reduced the hold of those unworthy over All Where.
“You don’t seem pleased to see me,” he sang, still coming, pushing against the strange resistance, a blustering wind, crackling with static and the Frost. Underneath it all, a wailing unlike anything else in the Web: snatches of angry screaming, as the tree and this hell-forsaken ball of rock jarred to momentary awareness of him, and thrust him away.
It wasn’t enough. Milton Harper approached.
He was still fifty feet from its base, yet still he held out a hand, reaching for it, hungry to touch it. Nothing could stop him now.
One foot in front of the other.
Then, pain. A sound lost between a howl and a roar of protest escaped his mouth, as every cell in his body trembled, vibrating with such temerity that for a moment he was sure he would shake apart. His feet left the floor, suspended an inch off the ground, limbs splayed. The Frost crept down onto his skin, a little of his own light fading as though a candle flame plagued by a sudden gale.
“No!” He grunted, struggling. It was no use. He couldn’t move an inch. “You can’t.”
A voice emerged from the tree, deep and soft and ageless. “No one may enter this place, vermin.” It uttered the latter word with contemplating aloofness, as though considering it, tasting it. Yes, vermin. “You cannot interfere. You defy the Old Laws by desecrating this temple.”
Hidden somewhere underneath a great weight of placidity, Harper sensed contempt, endless and seething.
He grated his teeth, wrestled against the seizing force, and snarled, “You can’t stop me. Not for long!”
That deep booming voice emerged from the tree, not from any mouth or orifice, but seeping from the bark itself. “Such is not necessary. We need only forestall you, vermin.”
Harper clenched his teeth. “Do not call me VERMIN!” he screamed, saliva spraying from his mouth. With immense effort he staunched the flow of rage flaring along his veins and closed his eyes, focusing his energies, expanding his sights to beyond the cavern. It hurt, the pain intense and nauseating—fighting against the Frost and the cavern’s many-layered protective shielding.
But in time, held there with his arms dangling at his sides and his legs slightly bent, a sad puppet abandoned mid-act, he found something. Something coming, for him, and for this place.
The signal popped as the rage afresh. “Kaard,” he hissed.
And something else. Something radiant, powerful, and sweet. He had sampled that sweetness before. The boy had been so much dimmer then, a mere fraction of the blinding beacon he had become—but it was him.
So bright has he become so fast. Dripping with delicious power.
A crooked smile contorted his face as he stared at the tree, staring it down. “You want to play? Fine, let’s play. Let them come.” He bit his lip, savouring the echo of that sweet, sweet power. “Come closer.”
22
Running the subway line felt like taking a treadmill session with the lights off and the neck of last week’s trash bag held to his mouth. Jack heard rats, a lot of rats—after a while the clickety-clack of claws was so prevalent, so close, that he found himself thankful for the dark.
Serves me right for reading so much James Herbert, he thought.
Barry’s heavy footfalls followed close behind, his breathing wet and wheezy.
Jack was glad to have Barry at his back, dwarfed by the distance he sensed ahead of them. They had a long trek and not a lot of time, and if Jack took a single wrong turn—if his little weather vane deviated off course even for a moment—there was no telling where they would end up.
He couldn’t explain it even to himself, and had given up trying to make sense of things, simply accepting them as they came, but he knew that where they were heading was somewhere else.
“If I had run down here yesterday, I wouldn’t have been able to get here, would I?” he said. “Even if I had taken the same steps.”
“Nope. Not in Kansas, any more.”
“You’re a walking cliché, Kaard.”
“Bite me. And it’s still Barry to you, earthling.”
Amongst the rats and the rails and the power lines, Jack felt everything shift in some queer manner, a translation through some extraneous space, and knew they had left Manhattan behind.
“Talk to me,” he said into the dark, his voice a phantom of itself.
Barry’s reply didn’t come immediately. For an agonising moment he just puffed along to the beat of his own steady plodding. “About what?”
The ground sloped down, a gentle gradient that would have been undetectable, were it not for Jack’s supercharged senses. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Got nothing to say.”
“I am running toward something that’d gut me as soon as lay eyes on me, I’m following a compass unaccountable to any kind of sense, I have the whole damn universe on my shoulders, and I hate fucking rats! Now talk to me, please.”
Amongst the huffing, a sigh. “Give me a seed.”
Jack said the first thing to enter his head. “Why Barnes & Noble?”
“Barney and who?”
“The book-store. My section. Why there?”
“That’s the Exit. One of the places the Frost can touch and poke a hole through from other places.”
“Like a chicken laying an egg?”
“There’s something wrong with you, Shannon.”
Jack smiled in the dark. “Does it hurt? When you… travel?”
“You have no idea.”
“What’s it like?”
“Like somebody dipped your bones in ice water, and punched you in the guts, at the same time.”
The gradient suddenly became precipitous, and Jack skidded to a halt, fearing Barry was too close on his heels and would come careening into him. But the Scot-but-not stopped short, in step with him, as though they were a three-legged race team, bound together by an invisible bungee.
He couldn’t see, not with the kind of light his eyes could pick up. But all the same, the opening before them was outlined in vivid detail, ten feet away, an orifice in the subway wall that jerked almost straight down, a sickening angle that almost seemed to suck him in.
“What’s down there?” Barry said at his shoulder.
“You don’t know?”
“From here on, I’m flying blind.”
“I thought you saw what I saw.”
“Not even close. I, we… nobody is supposed to come here. Not ever.”
Jack strained, that same internal flex from within, and felt his second sight tip into the chasm before them. He had to squint, push his way down as though digging with clawed hands. “It’s far,” he heard himself saying. He sounded a long way off. “Real far. Away from… here.”
“Already told you that.”
“No, right now we’re between places. But down there…” He couldn’t finish. There were no words to express what he felt. It was just different. “It’s tight. I don’t know if you’ll fit.”
Barry clapped Jack’s shoulder, a deep reverberating boom that made him jump. “I’ll fit. Under this handsome, rugged exterior is the lithe figure of a jungle cat.”
“Uh huh. And what do I do when you get stuck?”
“Butter m
e up. I’ll slide right down like a witchetty grub.
“Thank you for that mental image.”
The radio crackled at Jack’s belt. Garbled static emerged from the speaker. He grabbed at it with the desperation of a castaway and held it to his ear.
“Jack?” Kat’s voice.
“I’m here.”
Static. A garbled curse. Gunfire. “They’re here—many—can’t hold them—”
“We’re getting close!” he yelled into the mouthpiece. “Just hold on.”
“—ound—far away.”
We are, he thought grimly. So far I could never describe it to you.
“Hold on, Kat.” He returned the radio to his belt, and stepped up to the wall.
They breached the hole, boosting themselves through the ragged edges in the brickwork. Immediately they were sliding down. Jack’s stomach fluttered as his boots skittered on loose dirt, accelerating so fast that he was almost falling. He thrust his arms out to the side to brace himself, and came to a juddering halt.
A hail of stones rained on his back and shoulders from above as Barry also ground to a stop. The Scot-but-not had almost crashed into him and sent them both plunging down.
“Well, this is perfect,” Jack hissed.
“Don’t stop. There’s no time.”
Jack ambled down, skidding and slipping, gritting his teeth as spurs of rock sliced his palms and shins. He established a grim compromise between almost falling, and a crushingly gradual descent.
The rocks felt wrong, tainted, slicked with the scent of something that made Jack’s skin crawl. “I can feel him. Harper. He passed by here.”
“Yeah. Try to hold on to your dinner.”
It wasn’t the ugliness of the feeling that bothered Jack, but its faintness. He had felt the blazing intensity of the creature when Barry fought him. This was an afterglow, one fading fast.
“We’re so far behind,” he gasped, ambling awkwardly on splayed limbs. A slime trail might as well have lain in their wake.
“We’ll make it,” Barry groaned. Jack could feel the tension of Barry’s weight projected through his voice. “We’ll have to fall.”
“What?” Jack barked.
“We can’t do this all the way down. You know we can’t.”
Jack pushed ahead in his mind, saw the gulf that separated them from their destination, and scowled. “I can’t just let go. Jesus, even if I survive the fall, you’ll land on top of me.”
“We won’t die. We’ll just fall. We have to fall. It’s the only way to catch up.”
“They have gravity where you’re from, you freaking fruitcake? We’ll be slime on some rock down… down there.” But was it down? Really, quite, down?
Suddenly he didn’t know. They weren’t in Manhattan, after all. He resisted thinking about being in a place that wasn’t a place. Logic would only somersault.
He would have to trust Barry. “How do you know?”
“I don’t.” Barry’s voice was trembling from the strain of holding himself.
Jack almost screamed with incredulity. “If you don’t know, how could you—?”
“Jack! Let go!”
Fuck it.
Yelling at the top of his voice, cursing Barry/Kaard, the Man in Purple, Kat and all the rest, Jack pulled his arms away from the walls and shut his eyes tight. Tucking himself into a ball and pulling his head in towards his chest, Jack fell.
Tumbling end over end, the fluttering in his stomach went crazy. For a moment his hair flew, buffeted by a whistling wind. Then there was no air. He was well and truly lost, truly between.
A force took hold of him and pushed him down, some super gravity that had plucked him from the air and yanked him into the void. He risked taking a peek. His second sight picked out black rocks barrelling past at impossible speed. He almost vomited as he tumbled every which way, sideways, up and around impossible twists and turns, through crevices small enough to crush his ribs, his body rolling and pivoting of its own volition, pirouetting in space. Heart hammering, mouth ajar, all he could do was observe.
Somewhere above, he heard laughter; deep, manic roaring that seemed to echo in eternal fractal regression. The stupid mirth of the Scot-but-not, falling in his wake.
Somewhere amidst the madness, Jack had time for a single truly cogent thought to pass through his mind.
Who am I? Dorothy, or Alice?
Then his mind was struck utterly blank, for the tunnel widened, straightened, and ahead appeared something different. He accelerated still, the force insistent, urgent, tearing him and Barry onward toward what he now perceived as a speck darker than darkness, blacker than black.
The tunnel vanished, and at impossible speed a crystal floor rushed up toward him.
He hit solid ground hard enough to knock all the air from his lungs. Squirming like an impaled beetle, struggling to draw breath, he moved clumsily, the same awkwardness under gravity that comes after jumping on a trampoline.
Not far away, Barry stirred.
It was dark here, too, but Jack saw as clearly as if a bank of floodlights stood around him. Everything ached and twitched as though electrocuted, but he also felt powerful. The fall had awakened one last flood of whatever lay locked inside him.
Air trickled into lungs and he spluttered, wavering as he stood. Once he felt able, he took a single, deep breath. The very space around his body rippled, expanding with the walls of his chest.
I’m different now. The thought escaped unchecked into his head, scampering about and jostling childhood memories.
It wasn’t just the odd thrumming, not the clarity of his second sight. He felt strong, his arms and legs pent up with sudden vigour, the feeling of infinite possibility that comes with the buzz of a stiff drink.
With it, he saw everything. They had fallen into a vast cavern, perfectly round and capped by a layer of shifting, amorphous mist.
No, clouds. God, they’re clouds. Down here?
Wherever here is.
He tried his mental flex again, reaching back into the subway to Kat, hoping to check on her and the others.
Nothing. Beyond the great crystal bubble, he got nothing but a vague static. A busy signal.
On cue, the radio at his belt crackled. Kat’s voice had before been broken, but now sounded entirely unlike her, inhuman, warped and deep, as though she spoke from underwater. “Jack, hurry. The other—acons are waking u—hurry!”
“Kat.” Jack’s voice was raspy from the fall. “Kat, we’re getting close. Can you hold them?”
“—everywhere.”
“What? You’re breaking up.”
“I said they—everywhere.” Gunfire, interspersed with scratching static. “We can’t hold them!”
Barry’s paw slapped down on Jack’s shoulder.
“Kat, you still there?”
“Jack,” Barry said.
Jack threw him off. “Kat!” His heart bounced around in his chest.
I don’t know her. I don’t know any of them. Why do I care so much?
Because they’re my last tie to the world. All this craziness has pulled me so far from home. They’re all I have left.
“Kat!”
From the radio, more gunfire, a thousand tiny wasps in the palm of his hand. “Gant i—down.”
Barry tugged him. “Jack.”
“Kat, hold on. I can’t hear you.”
“Jack—” Kat’s voice cut out, and Jack’s ears exploded. The radio screamed in his hand, a wail worse than a thousand nails on as many chalkboards, crawling into his skull and hulling out his brains.
Kat’s voice reverberated amidst that endless screech, vanishing down into wailing oblivion. Jack dropped the radio and clapped his hands to his head. The scream died as the radio shattered on the crystal floor.
He blinked, the sound of his own breathing suddenly deafening. His hands wandered from his ears and he looked to Barry, whose outline flickered with tendrils of light,
set against the vast subterranean jewel. “What was that?” he whispered.
Barry opened his mouth to speak, shaken and battered, his jacket torn again by the fall. Then his eyes widened and his entire body dimmed, great chunks of light sloughing off him like dead skin. He stared blankly at the ground, his breath coming in shuddering gasps.
“What is it?”
“Highcourt…” Barry blinked. “They’re gone. They’re all gone.”
Jack felt it, too. Just standing near him, he felt it. A lancing pain so much worse than heartache, the grief of a thousand deaths all at once. Somewhere out there, a great many things of power had screamed as one, and winked out.
Disturbance in the Force. I think they just hit Alderaan.
“Barry. Kaard! What was that?”
“My people.” Barry’s mouth worked, the expressionless stare of an infant.
The answer came from another, a voice that sent the hairs on Jack’s whole body standing on end. “It is the End,” hissed the creature suspended in the air, fifty feet ahead of them.
Echoes returned from the far reaches of the cavern, somehow stretched, as though he couldn’t have reached the other side if he walked for a month. In its centre stood a giant black tree, its limbs split off into so many branches that it looked like the profile of some delicate sea anemone.
Its radiance almost blinded him. His mind reeled at having to hold his arm to shield his eyes, for all the absolute blackness of the cavern; an oppressive dark so deep, yet lit up so bright.
Suspended before the tree, ten feet off the floor, surrounded by filaments of that strange un-light, hung the creature.
When Jack had last seen Harper, his second sight had been but a glimmer. He had seen Harper as a suited, pasty-faced millennial, only the outermost hull of his true self showing through. Now there was no sign of the parted hair, the high cheek bones, or the thousand-yard stare. In its place, though still draped in the tailored jacket and the five-hundred-dollar loafers, was a beast of shadow: foot-long claws thrusting from the crook of each elbow; a pair of freight-train headlights for eyes, emitting beams of cold fire; a head ablaze with a halo of nothingness that permitted neither air nor even un-light to penetrate.
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