The beetles! My God.
I fished out 1779 from my pocket, and held it on my palm. Nothing to write with: note to self, start carrying a Sharpie around. Just in case. Fine-tip. Would it still find her? I urged it gently into the air and my heart sank as it simply circled me for a moment, as the watcher had done. Then it darted abruptly ahead, returning to scrabble at my coat, make sure I was following.
Stay calm, stay calm. There’ll be guards.
They split us up because. They split us up... but they must have made sure she saw the altar and the sacrifices. Showing it off: like a parade. You don’t have a parade and assume no one will come and watch. Or like parading through the cities of a conquered city. Textbook photo, black and white: Nazis in the streets of Paris. Boasting. Before you executed your enemy general, you made sure they knew just how many divisions were moving through the city of lights, just how defeated they really were...
Focus, stop it. Get out of here.
Or get her out of here. If you can only get one.
No, fucking stop it.
A sudden sense of motion arrested, of things that were not dragons. I froze, and moved carefully behind a bulge in the wall, reluctantly keeping my balance by holding the edge of one wrist-thick scale. The walls were definitely moving now, and the floor, very slowly, squeezing and bunching. Nowhere to go, I supposed. Like a nest of real snakes, shifting to try to get comfortable, but nothing around you to lie on except another snake... there.
A handful of dark forms—more guards—and something gleaming on the floor: Johnny’s face, her bared teeth, in the dim light. And someone or something tall, thin, leaning over her. Not merely thin, skeletal; the walls showing through the ribs. A skull twisted as a horn, something dripping from what should have been hands but were a mere mass of threads. I held my breath again. Move. Go. Move. Leave her. Get away from her, you fucker.
“Imagine,” the thing said, a thick clattering voice, like stones. “And you are the ones who came up with the saying we most love: Power corrupts. Before he was the Manifestation, you know he called himself the Corruption? That was ever and always your weakness. That you, that so many creatures like you, think corruption is real… speak. Speak to me, Zath curse you, Ulgellath rot you! I will break your bones and leave you for the Beast of Ogmoko to feast upon! Speak!”
Silence. She’s a contrarian, I wanted to tell the thing, wearily. The only way to get her to shut up is to ask her to say something.
“It matters not. It is not me you need to satisfy, little creature, little half-a-god. You are in a place between places now... What a pleasure it will be to give you to the one at last. He has hungered for you from the far side of the veil since the moment of his return.”
Silence.
“Once we wished to devour your world. Now, thanks to the Manifestation, there will be no need. And no resistance, and no return. Your world is riddled through with ours. Soon enough we will be one, and then there will be nothing to fight, and nothing to fight for, and we will all revel, we will make ceremony, we will wipe clean all your traces… Curse you, rot you! Speak!”
What was there, how could I draw their attention? And even if I did, could Johnny get us out? I didn’t think I could manage another watcher. I chewed on my lip, thinking, and at last unzipped her bag, moving slowly. Her phone barely had a charge but still worked, the screen blinding me for a moment. I held a hand over it as I hunted for something, anything that might help. There: music player. Unmute. Breathe.
Bad idea.
Yeah.
The opening strains of ‘Rapper’s Delight’ echoed around the maze of dragons, and as the thing leaning over Johnny straightened, startled, I wound up and threw the phone as hard as I could past it, the screen whirling into the darkness, a hell of a throw, just like I had taught the kids, right from the hip. In a split second the creature, and a half-dozen others, were racing after it, jaws snapping, and I had rushed in and hauled Johnny to her feet. The music cut off with a crunch.
“What the absolute—?”
“No idea, none. How do we get out of here?”
“This way!”
“But that’s back towards the—”
She didn’t reply; we sprinted through the maze, stuff flying out of her bag till I zipped it up again, and eventually ran back to the cathedral-like space where the backbone lay in its pool. The heads of the dragons were moving now, slowly, lazily, eyes opening.
“You are fucking crazy!” I whispered, grabbing her coat to stop her as she reached the edge of the cliff, the bodies writhing under our feet, so that it was hard to stay upright. “This is the worst fucking place we could have gone!”
“It’s the only place that goes between!”
“What?”
“Trust me!”
“Oh my God, we’re going to die.”
“Good. Excellent. Good.” She pawed at her bag and got out the deck of cards, digging feverishly through them. But the guards were coming back, their heavy footsteps just perceptible, transmitted through the tiled skin of the dragons under our feet. “One way out for us, another for them. Because we’re alive and… look, forget it. Quick!”
And she pulled us over the edge of the cliff, aiming for the pool of black water.
GOLDEN LIGHT SURROUNDED us, erasing my vision but doing nothing for the impact, which was like hitting concrete: we had broken bones, I was sure of it, ruptured organs, the liquid wasn’t water at all, but something else. Screams erupted around us, of surprise and horror—and laughter, which was worse, far worse.
Johnny’s face rising through it, brightly panicked. Everything began to flicker and between the flickers rose a terrifying sound: the endless mechanical clack of scales, speeding up, till it became a steady rat-a-tat like gunfire. I reached for her as she sank below the surface, one hand desperately waving the card with the sigil. The light faded, returned, as if the spell had rallied, or got a second wind, and I realized at once that it was doing what spells did best: compensating. Flowing to the places it had been guided into, using whatever was around. Magic and spirit and shape, geometry and breath, the intent of it, she’d said, the intent of magic particles. And if there wasn’t enough magic around, it would choose to draw from something else...
She descended, becoming translucent for a moment, and this time I felt something yank on us, hard, stopping-starting, stuttering, then catching, a terrible sense of emptying, even the light fading, and then a sudden shock of pressure, slapping the breath out of me, knocking my hand loose from the spell card. I watched it fall away with a terror that barely paralleled the loss of air.
Emptied of air, a hideous burning in the chest, light left me, gravity left me, I left me, my name, my body, my personhood
(but you know this)
(i do know this; i have died before)
and yet I had died before, drained of everything needed for life to fuel the spell that closed the gates, and this was not new; and it didn’t even come with the fear I had expected, only the heaviness, which I knew would come, and anger, which hurt more than the press against my ribs, the fluid sluicing through my body, the last sensations.
(Stand fast. You are not dead, but dying. And you are passing to a place where your dying will pause; and the time you bring with you will let you prolong it a little longer.)
(...fucking what?)
But the voice had come just in time, and as something seized me again, plunging me into the heavy darkness, I clutched the shreds of my last breath with a ferocity I had never imagined, picturing it like a shark, biting down, not letting go, hoping in the cold glassy dark—
It ended with impossible gentleness, like a bursting bubble, and I found myself soaked, cold, involuntarily gasping at the air and even swallowing it, jaws snapping, as if putting it in both lungs and stomach was the only way my body could get enough oxygen, and I couldn’t stop for what felt like forever.
Johnny had come through before me, and sprawled at my feet. With her hair and clothes plaste
red flat, she seemed very small. Drowned rat. I looked around, panting. Dark-green sky. Clouds. Swarms of things not birds, not reptiles, not insects. A thousand columns of living fire pacing the horizon. In the far distance, ordinary skyscrapers, battered, crumbling. Or turned into trees too tall to look at without feeling sick.
And the war ongoing for now, but already won, preemptively won, by someone too much like Johnny to lose, the world ended if it was the world we had loved and known, and a new one begun, the sound of laughter somewhere we could no longer hear, but unceasing nonetheless.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I SAT AWAKE all night, half-dozing with my hand on her back, unable to move it, afraid to break the connection with whatever thread of life she still clung to in her sleep. If I let go I’d never know if she died, and I had to know. Her breath was inaudible, slow and shallow, her back barely rising, icy under my palm.
Sherwood had called to let me know they had taken my family to ‘a safe place,’ but warned me, wearily, as if he had had to recite the same speech many times in the last few hours, that nowhere was truly safe; that even now, local assistance of some kind could probably be spared to get me out; that he was very sorry; that I should probably take him up on the offer; that in his opinion I had done enough.
Mine too, I thought. Very, very much my opinion. And still, even as I made the necessary calls, sent reassuring texts to Carla and Mom, I kept a hand on the back of the one who might cause their deaths. Not yet, but soon. If she died I wanted to feel the life leave her body.
Outside, the city began to come to life. Traffic, honking. People chatting as they passed below the window. I had noticed, while half-watching her limp form inside the cab, that some areas of the city were virtually intact, and others unrecognizably changed. Something to do with the placement of wards, I assumed. Things the Society had maybe not discovered or taken down, still doing their job. No one cared about the alerts any more, disregarding orders both to shelter in place and to evacuate. The streets had been filled with people even as the river had turned to magenta oil, in the blink of an eye the home of writhing creatures crowned with the blank, waxy faces of porcelain masks.
Remember everything, I told myself. Remember that you saw this. The last of the world.
Still she did not wake.
The sun came up, glowing at the backs of the velvet curtains, illuminating something at an angle: the triangular scar on the back of her arm that I thought I had seen back at the Castle, high up, almost hidden under the sleeve of her t-shirt. I knew what that was from; and I knew who had died a moment before she got it. Why hadn’t she just erased it like all of the others, like all of mine? Even one this deep would have been gone after a session or two.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I woke with a guilty start, jerking upright, to the sound of knocking at our door; Johnny was still curled up, motionless. I frantically checked her pulse: Better? Worse? I couldn’t tell, but it was there, anyway.
The knocking continued, patient, loud. I got up, everything creaking, and peered through the peephole. Housekeeping; the silver cart.
Jesus. I opened the door, mumbled something, and hung the tasseled sign on the doorknob again before closing it. When I turned back, Johnny was sitting up at last, staring around herself dazedly.
“You okay?” I said. “Do you need your inhaler or whatever? Water?”
She shook her head. I got her a glass of water anyway, and put it on her bedside table, sitting on my own bed. “We lost your phone,” I said.
“I saw.”
“And I think I dropped some other stuff. I’m sorry.”
She bobbed a shoulder, a half-shrug.
And the world’s going to end for real this time, worse than any other time in history, and there’s nothing we or anybody else can do about it. I’m sorry about that too. I said, “Who was that? Talking to you. Down there. In…”
“A second-in-command,” she said dully. “Didn’t get his name. Doesn’t matter anyway. Because the Manif…” Her laughter sounded like yelping, as if she had tried to stifle it too late. “Can you believe some fuckers? Even I don’t go around calling myself The… The Inventorator or whatever.”
“Which isn’t a word.”
“Just invented it. That’s my superpower.” She wiped her eyes. “It isn’t funny, I’m not laughing. It’s just that I knew, part of me knew. As soon as Huxley started talking about tactics, strategies, I knew. The fucking… Manifestation, whatever he’s calling himself. He lied to people a few thousand years ago and called himself Nyarlathotep, he’s called himself all sorts of shit. He’s…”
“Like you,” I said.
She glanced at me, wounded, then sighed. “Yes. I don’t know… Yes. He’s the one who figured out the magical prion. Pantograph: what it copies is what They are. He likes to use new weapons to fuck things up. Worlds. The second said… that was what he was doing during the Anomaly. He came back just in time to get kicked out again. And he told everybody, everything: I want her as a trophy. I want her when we come back. That’s why They kept trying to snatch us. They might still try again. Who knows.”
Making enemies, I thought. We might have gotten away with it if she hadn’t… stop it. It’s too late. I said, “So there’s really nothing we can do.”
“There’s really nothing.” She laughed again, and again it did not sound like laughter. “And for that. Hardly an insult, you’d think. Barely even a… a slap in the face.”
“Johnny, listen,” I said, exhausted. “You can slap anything in the face. Anything you want. What you can’t expect is not to get slapped back. What, you thought you were stronger than Them? Better than Them?”
“But we didn’t do anything. Not really. Not in comparison to what They did.”
“Since when do They care about comparison?”
“I know. I know. So yeah. I think there’s nothing we can do. Not any more.”
I tried to think of a reply to that, the finality of it, tried to wrap my head around what it meant. Everything we had, everything we loved, gone. My head felt full of something claggy—asphalt, mud. Nothing moved. “How long do you think we have till it’s all over?”
“Hard to say. Guess it depends on what you define as all. I think the prion isn’t… perfectly infectious, if that makes sense. Things are happening unevenly, with big temporospatial gaps. If we still had those files from Dr. Chan, maybe I could figure out the rate of…” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t make any difference anyway. To know.”
“Most of the city’s still the city,” I said after a minute, not knowing what else to say. I didn’t want to comfort her; I didn’t think she deserved it. But I had to say something. “Do you want to go get something to eat?”
“...Yeah.” But she didn’t get up, only sat hunched, arms folded on the bedspread, a pallid grub against the rich purple and gold. The bruises around her eyes were fading at last, from black and violet to blue and green. “I... I wanted to leave a world that... wouldn’t need me any more.”
“I know.”
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Give the world everything it needed to make sure no one like me would be needed again. And They know that. And that’s why They wanted to… give me this. Make me this. It’s all my fault. I did exactly what They wanted me to, thinking I wasn’t.”
It was a statement of such utterly pathetic misery, or utterly horrifying ego, or both, that I couldn’t come up with a reply.
I fell asleep again while she showered, and by the time we were both moving at more than a crawl, the sun was getting low. It didn’t matter; there was no rush to do anything now.
Johnny said, as we left, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For coming back for me.”
“Like I was gonna leave you there.”
“You could go,” she said softly. “Leave the city, I mean. I’m pretty sure I could get you on a plane, even if the airport is locked down. There’s still flights going in a
nd out. Diplomats, cargo, couriers. Mail. Stuff like that. I could make some calls.”
Yes, I almost said. Holy shit. Yes. Get me home. Back to my people. I don’t care where you go.
But no. Not if I have to see them writhing, changing, crying out in pain, for help… Fucking coward, I told myself. You don’t want to go where you can’t help. Well, you can’t help here. If she says there’s no chance, there’s no chance. She, of all people.
Johnny was looking up at me. I took a deep breath and said, “...No. No, it’s okay. Come on. Like Mulder leaves Scully to do the work alone.”
“Yeah, every time they split up, one of them gets abducted by aliens. Or serial killers or whatever.”
“Or monsters.”
“Yeah, or they fall into a cave or a sinkhole or something.”
“How do they even still have jobs?” I mused. “I’d have fired them by now. Or made them into mail clerks.”
“They’d probably get abducted by a mail-monster.”
It had snowed, thawed, snowed again; an inch or so lay on the ground, sky-blue in the lowering night, with a thin, glassy layer of ice inside it that broke and glittered under our boots.
She was mumbling, head down as we walked. I had to stoop to listen to her, and finally stopped her, moving her under a doorway; she looked terrible. “We should go back,” I said. “You need sleep.”
“But we’re here already.”
“We’ll order in or something. Don’t… make yourself do this.”
“It doesn’t matter. They’re not insects, not animals. We are.”
“We fought back last time.”
A Broken Darkness Page 24