By twisting around to look at him, I’d started a rotation I couldn’t stop. I kept spinning, slowly, like a rotisserie chicken, and tried to control my panic at the endless . . . endless . . . endless . . . falling.
It’s a nightmare, I realized suddenly. Falling forever . . . it’s a classic nightmare.
But terrifying though it was, it wasn’t one of my nightmares. Was this something else that had leaked into the island from the world we were trying to get to?
I took a shuddering breath as I rotated again and continued, in my head at least, to fall. Maybe this didn’t used to be one of my recurring nightmares. After this, I’m pretty sure it will be.
Karl reappeared sometime between when I turned facedown and when I turned faceup again. He now lay flat on his stomach. He had removed his leather jacket (which was much the worse for wear after a thorough saltwater soaking aboard Amazon). Holding on to one end of one sleeve with both hands, he reached down as far as he could, so the end of the other sleeve dangled just above me. “Grab it.”
I did, gratefully, as it came into reach. My rotation stopped with a jerk as the jacket tightened, but I kept falling.
Maybe just a little scream . . . ?
I clenched my jaw shut.
Karl pulled. I rose effortlessly, as though I were a helium-filled balloon, for about five of the six feet . . . and then suddenly my weight returned. I gasped, and swung forward against the wall of the pit with a bone-jarring impact. But now I could get an elbow over the lip of the precipice, and with Karl’s help, added a leg to that. A second later I rolled onto my back on the solid rock, panting, drenched in sweat. “What a nightmare!”
“Why were you screaming?” Karl said. “You only fell a few feet. After that, you hung suspended.”
I explained. He looked thoughtful. “So it was literally a nightmare. But not yours.”
“It is now,” I muttered.
“You are a very powerful Shaper,” Karl said. “As you know. But I am beginning to believe that whoever has Shaped the world we will be entering next must be almost as powerful as you. That is the only way I can imagine your subconscious minds Shaping this island in this fashion. It is most interesting . . . I wonder if Ygrair is familiar with the phenomenon, and if we might encounter it elsewhere?”
“Interesting?” I said. “I think you mean terrifying.”
“That too, no doubt. Though, obviously, more so for you than for me.” Karl looked over his shoulder in the direction we had come. “Your screams were . . . piercing. We may have revealed our location to our pursuers. We should keep moving.”
“How?” I demanded. “That pit blocks the way forward.”
“Not quite,” Karl said. “There is a thin ledge. Over there.” He pointed to the right. I aimed the flashlight in that direction. Sure enough, there was a ledge, though even calling it “thin” seemed a little too gracious.
“I think we should both have flashlights from here on,” I said. I handed him his.
“I agree. It appears there may be an end to the tunnel in sight, in any event.”
I was taking my flashlight from my belt, with a hand still inclined to tremble, when I heard the distant sound of breaking wood from the direction we had come . . . a sound like someone had just taken an ax to the door we had locked, at the bottom of the stairs.
“Time to go?” I said flashlight in my hand.
“Indubitably,” Karl said.
We eased along the narrow ledge. Even knowing that falling into the pit wasn’t falling to my death—unless my heart gave out—I didn’t want to repeat the experience. Also, floating helplessly in a nightmare pit didn’t seem like a good place to be when those chasing us, who we had every reason to believe would shoot me on sight, caught up.
On the far side of the pit, I flashed my light at the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. I didn’t see any more traps. That didn’t, of course, mean they didn’t exist.
Ahead of us the gray light gleamed. The tunnel curved just enough that we couldn’t see where it was coming from. But there was a sound, too, a rushing sound . . . the sound of falling water.
We hurried along the tunnel. The gray light grew closer with unnatural reluctance, as though the tunnel were lengthening almost as fast as we rushed along it . . . which it might very well be. Running along a tunnel you could never get to the end of, pursued by something or someone murderous—that was one of my recurring nightmares.
Shouts behind us. An instant later Karl tackled me, so that we slammed to the floor together. A deafening bang, a spray of rock from the ceiling . . . someone had fired at us. “Turn off your light!” Karl cried, suiting actions to words. “Roll!”
I didn’t argue. Flicking off my flashlight, plunging us into darkness again—the gray light around the bend still an unknown and completely unreasonable distance in front of us—I rolled hard to the left, just in time, as another shot hit the floor where I’d been an instant earlier.
More shouts. I looked back. Lights bobbed on the helmets of six dark figures. I hoped they didn’t have night-vision goggles, but even if they didn’t, we were pinned down. If we stood up we’d silhouette ourselves against the light at the end of the tunnel. If we stayed where we were, they’d soon be even with us . . . or they’d just hose us down with bullets.
“What do we do?” I whispered to Karl.
He didn’t say anything for a second. Then, “What is your worst nightmare?”
“You mean besides having people who want to kill me chasing me down a dark tunnel that never seems to get any shorter?”
“Yes,” he said. “Besides that.”
“Why?”
“Because I think you can Shape it into reality.”
“I’m burned out. No Shaping ability. You know that.”
“In your world. But this is not, or at least not entirely, your world, is it? It is partially yours, and partially someone else’s. There is creative energy bound within it, holding it in place. You should be able to access that energy.”
“But why would I use it to Shape a nightmare?”
“I think that’s all you can Shape in here,” Karl said. “Things that are buried in your subconscious, things that aren’t real, the things that go bump in the night.”
I looked back. The dark figures were at the edge of the pit I had fallen into. They’d soon find the ledge we had followed and come after us.
“My worst nightmare,” I said, “is being buried alive.”
“Make it theirs,” Karl said softly.
I swallowed. The armed men . . . and at least two women, it looked like . . . had found the ledge. They were moving toward it.
I reached for my Shaping ability. To my surprise, I found it, but it felt . . . different. Tainted. Odd. Twisted. Uncomfortable.
I didn’t want to bury anyone alive. I certainly didn’t want to bury us alive. But if I could bring down the tunnel between us and them, buy us time, enough time to escape . . .
I imagined the ceiling of the section of tunnel we had just passed weakening, cracking, the weight of the rock suddenly too much to be supported. I believed it. But even as I did so, I felt something else mixed in with my belief, something that came from outside, something I didn’t put there.
The ground shook. There was a series of earsplitting cracks. And then something massive and made of stone dropped from the ceiling . . .
. . . but it wasn’t just a falling rock. It had a shape, a humanoid shape. It hit the floor with a grinding thud, and then roared with a voice like an avalanche thundering down a mountainside.
“What did you do?” Karl cried.
“I don’t know,” I shouted back above the cacophony. “I thought I was shaping a rock fall, not a . . .” I suddenly realized I knew exactly what the thing was. “Not a troll!”
“A troll?”
“I think so.” Which h
ad to have come from the Shaper of the next world. Just what kind of world was it?
We weren’t buried alive and neither were our pursuers, but perhaps that was the next step: the troll reached up and tore pieces of rock from the ceiling as if they were chunks of bread from a fresh loaf and then hurled them down the tunnel. Away from us, for the moment, but I didn’t believe for a second that the troll would spare us if it saw us. I had Shaped the stone, but someone else had Shaped whatever spirit animated it. It was, literally, a creature from someone else’s nightmare.
Still, it had the killers chasing us occupied, and so we took our chance and scrambled up and ran.
Maybe my Shaping gone wrong had accomplished one other thing: the tunnel suddenly seemed just an ordinary tunnel, no longer stretching interminably out in front of us. We reached the bend just as the troll roared again. I wondered if it had seen us, but only for a second, because all doubt was removed when a boulder half the size of the SUV we’d sunk in the quarry crashed into the floor at our heels, the shock knocking me to my knees. I stumbled up. The next one would crush us . . .
But no more boulders came our way. Weapons fired in the tunnel behind us, flashes of light silhouetting the monstrous form of the troll, which presumably therefore had other things to attend to.
The sound of falling water surrounded us now, and I saw that the gray light that had guided us along the tunnel streamed in through a waterfall, a liquid curtain across the cave mouth, thick enough to hide whatever lay beyond it. It might fall a thousand feet, and we would step through it to our deaths. Or something even worse might await us.
But we couldn’t wait where we were. Behind us, the rifle fire stopped. The troll roared defiance.
And then, a second later, came the explosion.
Clearly the forces trailing us had more than small arms at their disposal: at a guess, they’d been carrying a rocket launcher. The shockwave from whatever they’d fired knocked me to my knees. The head of the troll, a crude approximation of a human’s, slammed against the end of the tunnel, and rolled to within a foot of me. Blank, black obsidian eyes gleamed blindly up at my face.
Karl staggered, but remained standing. He pulled me upright. “Come on,” he said, and plunged through the curtain of water.
We didn’t fall to our deaths. Instead, we emerged into an amphitheater. The water flowed out of the rock fifty feet up a granite cliff and dropped smoothly into a narrow trench, draining away as fast as it entered. Around us rose ranks of benches, carved into the stone of what looked to be a natural bowl-shaped depression in the top of the mountain, so many rows of them that the topmost seats faded into the thick, dripping fog that still hung over everything.
At the center of the amphitheater’s smooth granite floor stood a massive block of black stone, steps leading up to its top on two sides. On top of that pedestal stood . . . was that an altar? Also black, of course.
“This,” I said, “makes no sense. No one lives on this nonexistent island. So who uses this place?”
“Think dreams and nightmares again,” Karl said.
“This isn’t my dream or my nightmare.”
“Are you sure?” he said. “Do you remember all of them?”
That stopped me, because of course I didn’t: no one remembers all of their dreams. I looked around uneasily. Had this . . . sacrificial stadium . . . come from some deeply buried part of my subconscious?
It was not a comfortable thought.
“Our friends may be joining us at any moment,” Karl said then. Yet he did not move from where he stood. “Can you feel it? The thin place between the worlds, where I will open the Portal? Can you see it?”
“Where?”
“Up there.” He pointed to the top of the stone block.
At first, all I saw above the altar was the cloudy sky, darkening now as twilight neared. But then something else registered . . . a kind of shimmer, like you see over a blacktop road on a hot summer’s day, although there was nothing hot or summery about where we stood. As soon as I saw it, I didn’t understand how I hadn’t been able to see it a moment before . . . and I hated it; hated it, because that shimmer looked wrong. Not evil, like the altar, but . . . out of place.
Which I supposed it was, if it was a spot where elements of another world were leaking into mine. It really was out of place. Out of its own world.
And we were going to try to tear it wide open.
Or Karl was, at least. Only he could do it.
“We need to get right up to it,” he said. “We have to move.”
We started across the granite floor. As we got closer to the black block I saw that it had channels carved in its sides, running down from the top to rusty metal grates in the granite floor. I didn’t think for a moment they were meant to convey water.
“If even half this stuff is coming from the next world over,” I said as we approached that towering pedestal, our footsteps echoing back from the terraced stone benches, “are you sure we want to go there? This looks very tear-the-heart-out-of-a-human-sacrificey to me. What if it’s a Mayan world, or a Conan the Barbarian one? Or someone with a Lovecraft fetish?”
“We have no choice,” Karl said. “The worlds touch the worlds they touch.”
I looked at that forbidding block of stone, looming above us now. If any inanimate object could look evil, it did. The stone wasn’t just ordinary black stone, like that of the cliffs that had thwarted our first attempts to reach the island’s interior: up close, they had been speckled with shining bits of other minerals. This rock was so black it seemed almost to glow, a kind of negative glow, as though it were actively sucking light from its surroundings. And I really, really hoped that it had come from someone else’s subconscious, because if it was from mine . . .
I shot another look over my shoulder at the screen of water. “Do you think the tunnel was blocked behind us when the troll was destroyed?”
“Possibly,” Karl said. “But there are multiple ways into this amphitheater.”
I looked around. Off to our left, a pillared portico extended from an ornate archway. I could see bricks lining the tunnel inside. Would those central stairs have brought us to it if we had continued climbing them?
At the far end of the amphitheater were two plain-looking wooden doors, one toward the left, one toward the right, far too flimsy to pose much of an obstacle to our pursuers if they came that way.
“No matter what, we have little time,” Karl said. He started up the steps.
Reluctantly, I followed. Even through the soles of my boots, the black stone seemed . . . unclean . . . as if it were covered with a thin layer of tar. “Why build an amphitheater if there are no people to sit in the seats and watch the . . . show?” I wondered out loud. The stadium seemed to grow larger as we climbed, as more seats materialized in the fog hiding the upper reaches.
“Perhaps something other than people comes to watch,” Karl said.
“More monsters?”
He shrugged.
If you build it, they will come, I thought, and wished I hadn’t.
We reached the top of the black block of stone. It seemed taller than it had from below, as if it had grown as we climbed: in fact, we now seemed to be almost level with the topmost seats in the amphitheater. Like the tunnel, I thought. Like a nightmare. For the first time, I saw that flags flew all around the stadium’s rim, red flags, the color of clotted blood. The drop to the stone floor below was now terrifying in its own right.
That strange, disquieting shimmer hung in the air above the altar. It set my teeth on edge. “How do you do this?” I said. “How do you open a Portal between worlds?”
“I have told you,” Karl said. “I have been given a . . . tool . . . which makes it possible.”
“And only someone with that tool can do it?”
Karl hesitated. “I am not certain. It is possible Ygrair can open
Portals solely through the force of her Shaping ability . . . or could, at the peak of her strength, before she was injured.”
“Then is it something I can learn to do?”
“I do not yet know what you can learn to do,” Karl said. “And unless you escape the Adversary, neither you nor I nor Ygrair will ever find out.” He stepped forward, so that his thighs pressed against the altar. Roughly the size of a dining room table, the stone slab might have passed for one if not for the openings cut in its surface, which led to the gutters I had noted running down the block’s side: those, and the exceedingly unappetizing carvings around the slab’s base. I didn’t examine them in detail, but they seemed closely related to the monstrous statues we had seen in the tunnel.
Karl reached out into the air, into that shimmer. As his hand entered it, it grew indistinct—ghostly. He closed his eyes, and cocked his head to one side, concentrating: then he moved his hand up, as high as he could reach, over to the right a few inches, down, left, down, then up again, repeating the pattern over and over, faster each time.
And as he did so, the shimmer strengthened, and began to glow—not some kind of mystical glow, but the glow of sunlight, bright sunlight, streaming out of midair into the gray fog of my world. At first that light poured through a tiny opening, maybe the size of a teacup, but with each pass of Karl’s hand, the opening grew. To the size of notebook. The size of a microwave. And, eventually . . . the size of a door.
I could see through it, as though I was looking through a pane of rippled glass. Blue above, green below. No details, like an Impressionist painting. No sound. “Is it open?” I breathed.
“No,” Karl said. He pulled his hand back, stared at it. “Something is keeping it from opening all the way. It’s as though . . .” He blinked, looked down at the altar, then looked up again. “Oh,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I think—”
But what he thought he didn’t say, because at that moment four black-clad armed figures burst through the wall of water onto the granite floor of the amphitheater, far below us.
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