Then, there it was—a small fissure in the rock that was just narrow enough for them to slip through but too narrow, Erik thought, for those barbed whips.
Mendez was keeping up beside him but panting and coughing. He tugged Mendez toward the fissure and they both ducked through, clearing the entrance by a few feet before stopping to catch their breaths. Beyond the pocket of boulders where they stood was a small valley that continued along the length of the cliffs but was canopied by outcroppings of rock formations. As they considered where to go next, there was a thunderous crash as one of the tails slammed against the narrow rock arch. The creature bellowed in frustration, and another booming sound echoed through the valley as it pounded the arch again. It was trying to break through. They couldn’t stay where they were. Erik looked uneasily above him, where a faint sound of creaking rock echoed down beneath the cacophony. He hoped that the Higher Power N.A. had been so fond of invoking, whatever it was and wherever it was, could span universes too, and if so, keep an avalanche from crushing them to death against the extrinsic stone.
They made their way as quickly and carefully as they could tight along the cliff face beneath the rock canopy where the beast couldn’t reach them. After what seemed to Erik like an eternity, the frustrated bellows of the creature behind them receded to angry rumbles. Occasionally the creaking above them drew their eyes up to scan for signs of loose rock about to fall. The uneven terrain beneath them offered nothing safer; it threatened to twist limbs and break bones with a misstep. It was rough work and took what felt like hours of sweating and puffing before the canopy of rock above them pulled back and a familiar vista opened up. Half a mile or so ahead were the shifting, rotating bases of the inverted pyramids.
It was all they could do not to run—until they heard the scream.
Chapter 12
Ian had never considered himself a take-charge kind of guy. He had an IQ of 152 and a photographic memory and could pick up the basics of a language with only limited exposure to it, but these skills had never been the kind that, in his mind, made a leader. Leaders were strong, brave, resourceful, athletic, quick, and bold. Ian was none of those things.
However, seeing the way Lauren had crumpled to the ground, seeing the fear in her eyes, he felt he needed to do something, or at least to say something that would let her know everything was going to be all right. Lauren was smart; he could tell that just from talking to her. She was brave and strong—she had to be, to work with the kind of patients she did, though he doubted she saw it that way. He suspected that when Lauren needed to, she could take charge quite effectively. But this situation seemed to be beyond her ability to think through at the moment. He didn’t want her to feel helpless. If Erik was right, then that would only leave her more vulnerable to the Hollowers’ attacks. And he had no doubt that just because they had shoved clear of anything in his own known universe, that didn’t mean that the Hollowers weren’t watching and waiting, somewhere in the periphery.
“Lauren,” he began. She looked up at him from where she sat on the ground. Her eyes—they were really very beautiful eyes—were wet with tears.
“Lauren, we’re going to get out of here.”
She sighed. “I don’t see how.”
He looked around at the structures, still shuffling infinitesimally and rotating from time to time on their bases. “I think,” he said, “that Erik had the right idea. Wrong building maybe, but the right idea.” He crouched down beside her. “See, the one we picked had markings inside. Hieroglyphics and symbols from even older languages. Earth languages, mostly. This is a whole other universe. Those languages could only be known if there were, at some point, some crossing of worlds. It’s possible this whole grouping of buildings or whatever they are may have little pieces we need to get out of here.
She looked from him to the buildings, then back to him. “What about Erik and Detective Mendez?”
“Well,” he answered softly, “we won’t find them sitting here. Come on.” They rose and faced the buildings.
After a moment, Lauren said, “I think we should try that one.” The building she was looking at was smaller than the others, and leaning to the left.
He smiled, glad she had recovered from her shock quickly and enough to want to contribute. “Why that one?”
She pointed to a symbol carved into the front-most face that hadn’t been visible from that angle before its most recent rotation. “I don’t know what that actual symbol means in any language, but to me, it looks like caduceus, with the staff part there and those coiling things like snakes around it. If I’m even close, that would be some kind of medical building. The Hollowers came through to our world via a medical building. Maybe there has to be something corresponding on the other side.”
Ian squeezed her shoulder and noticed she blushed a little. “Good thinking. Let’s go.”
They moved with caution toward the building Lauren had indicated. It wasn’t so much a conscious thought in Ian’s mind that it would be dangerous to startle the structures, but the sentiment was there all the same. Whatever these structures had been created for, they were more than just shells, more than just buildings.
The structure which had the caduceus carved into it leaned over them as they approached, bulging about halfway toward the top of the flat base. The bulge grew defined in shape—a rectangle—and from beneath it, another rectangle flipped outward on an angle and then another until a crude detached staircase had formed in a spiral around the whole pyramid. At the top of the stairs, the stony substance puckered and fell away like sand, sinking to form an opening about six feet in height.
“Should we...?”
Lauren took his hand, squeezed it, and started up the stairs. He followed close behind her. They made their way up with slow and careful steps, a hand on the wall to steady them. Beneath his palm, the surface of the structure felt cool and slightly grainy, like a fine-grade sandpaper. Occasionally, it rippled beneath his fingers, particularly if he pressed it harder for balance.
When they reached the top, they peered together into the building’s interior beyond the opening. It was unlighted inside, but from the top step, they could see an impossibly long hallway. Lauren squeezed his hand again, and together, they went inside.
The hallway reverberated a hollow echo as he and Lauren crept along. From what he could make out in the dim light, white cobblestones ran the length of floor beneath him, and smooth white stone comprised the walls and ceiling.
The faint strain of a child’s laugh—or a cry; it was hard to be sure—made its way back to them. In the dark, he could feel Lauren squeeze his hand again. Just then the tunnel opened up, and they found themselves in a large, domed room, Victorian in style and entirely white with light blue trim, wainscoting, and breadboard. The ceiling dome was painted a light blue like the sky, and someone had painted clouds that suggested faces overlaid. Whether they were faces of angels or gods or even demons, Lauren couldn’t say. There was no furniture in the room except for a single wing-back easy chair slightly off-center. The chair’s blue paisley cushions had long slashes in them as if from knives or claws.
“Where are—” Before Lauren could finish the question, the chair scraped across the floor.
A young boy was sitting in it. His feet barley brushed the floor. He was pale, hollow-eyed and dark-haired. His head was bowed so that his chin touched the top of his bony little chest.
The boy’s bones looked to be all broken and disjointed, and his flesh was rotting away. Something—his eye, Ian thought—hung limp and drying from a socket.
A rush of dizziness seemed to come over her, and he caught her and held her up as she fought it.
“Dustin?”
The boy looked up. His right eye swung from its socket.
“Dustin?” Her voice cracked.
“That’s not your cousin,” Ian told her. He touched her arm. “Come on.”
“You let him hurt me.” The voice from the thing that looked like Lauren’s cousin was sc
ratchy, a smoker’s voice, an old man’s voice. No, he thought. A mangled voice. The voice of a crushed windpipe.
“I tried to help you.”
“Ignore it,” Ian told her. “You know that’s not your cousin. Ignore whatever it says to you.”
The child-thing ran a fingernail beneath a protruding shard of rib, following the curve still encased in his thin skin, and drew blood. He peeled back the pale flap of flesh and it sloughed off easily into his hand.
“I’m sorry. I tried.” Lauren’s voice was losing steam, losing volume and strength. The memory, Ian supposed, was a very powerful one.
“You didn’t! You didn’t try!” It rose from the chair.
“Please,” she whispered, begging with it. “Please.”
Ian looked around the room for something he could throw at it, something he could puncture the illusion with. There was debris in the corners, suggesting a room long relegated to locked doors and disuse—part of a cardboard box, some papers, broken pieces of the crown molding and wainscoting He spied a lone table leg and lifted it to hurl it at the thing in the chair. When he turned to it, however, it was his mother. Leather straps around her wrists and ankles bound her to an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair. She looked worn and pale. Her hair hung limp and colorless around her face.
“You’re a rotten son,” it said in that same terrible, choked voice. “You let them kill me.”
“You. Are. Not. My. Mother!” he screamed, and threw the table leg as hard as he could. It hit the thing just above the right eyebrow, and the head burst open like a pinata. From inside, blue light poured forth, lighting the corners that gloom had obscured. In those corners, corpses slumped in chairs, their bony wrists strapped down. There were a dozen of them, maybe more.
In a far corner of the room was a doorway, and Ian tugged Lauren through the blue light toward it. Lauren’s hip bumped one of the chairs and the head of the corpse sitting in it rolled down the chest and onto the floor in a puff of dust. From the neck, hundreds of shiny black bugs began to pore out, chirping and creaking and scrabbling on thousands of tiny legs. Lauren gagged and ran to catch up with Ian, who was waiting for her in the doorway. The two pitched through and sailed down a long flight of stone steps that spiraled round and round and round until Ian felt seasick.
Finally, the stairs emptied out onto a stone landing and into another room.
“Where the hell are we now?” Frustration and anger were beginning to weigh on him. They weren’t getting anywhere except deeper in trouble.
The room they were in was also made of a kind of stone, but sand-colored. Whereas the room upstairs had been most definitively human in style, this room was alien in its strange asymmetrical angles and odd slopes. The impossible geometries and physics of the larger structures outside were, in smaller scale, present in this room as well. Looking too long at any one aspect of the architecture made Ian feel sick.
“I don’t know.” Lauren’s own frustration colored her expression as well.
There was nothing in the room except for a long, jade-green slab irregularly cut but polished to a shine. On this slab were large oval stones. Ian walked up to them and looked down.
At first, the symbols carved in the stones were unfamiliar, a language he had never seen before. Then the symbols swam in his vision and reformed themselves into words he recognized. His mother had taught them to him just as she had taught him Latin and Greek, Egyptian and Phoenician. His major in Ancient Languages had touched on it, too. Nothing in the room may have been human, but the language on those stones now was. It was ancient Aramaic.
“I can read this,” he said.
“What?” Lauren looked at him, surprised.
“Yeah, languages—that’s sort of my specialty. Ancient Languages. This is Aramaic. It’s an Afroasiatic language believed to be at least 3000—” He felt the blush in his cheeks, knowing how obscure and probably unsexy all that sounded.
But she startled him by saying, “Wow, that’s really cool. I’ve never met anyone who knew ancient languages. That’s really amazing.”
He studied her face to see if she was being sarcastic, but both her tone and the look in her eyes were sincere.
“Well, thanks.” He returned her smile.
“So what does it say?”
“Oh, right. Let’s see....” He studied the symbols carefully. “This here is talking about the mind and the soul...about...soul eaters.” He frowned. “It’s talking about how the soul eaters swim through the...I’m not sure what that is, but I think it’s empty space. How they swim through the empty space looking for souls and that whatever they devour becomes lost forever. It says nothing can contain them except their....”
“Their what?” Lauren asked when he paused.
“The black hole of their home.”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It...it almost sounds like it’s talking about the Hollowers. They are soul eaters, in a way.”
“That last part...if we send them home...?”
“I—”
Just then, a loud siren wail filled the room. Ian covered his ears. The stones trembled and broke into pieces. The jade slab beneath cracked in half and fell down into the pit beneath.
“What the—”
Then something pushed him and he was falling forward, falling down, down that long pit. He heard Lauren screaming and knew she was falling too. Part of him wanted to just keep falling, to avoid whatever was at the bottom and whatever the Hollowers wanted to throw at them next. He couldn’t imagine how Erik could have kept picking himself up and dusting himself off, over and over. As he fell toward the unknown, a part of him just wanted to give up. He closed his eyes.
He landed hard enough to bite his tongue. He heard a hard thump next to him, and Lauren coughing. He opened his eyes. They were outside again in the courtyard.
“This is getting old,” Ian said, sitting up. He got up and helped Lauren to her feet.
The buildings had all cleared to the side of the courtyard. In the center, hovering a few feet above the stones, was a mass of whirring black wings. That was all Ian could see at first, just a mass of black wings moving so quickly they blurred. Then some of the wings stopped moving and Ian could make out three mouths in a triangle shape, thin black lips bared to show sharp yellow teeth.
“Oh! Oh shit!” Lauren grabbed Ian’s arm.
The wings started up again and the monster lunged toward them. Lauren screamed.
A moment later there was the pounding of feet and Ian turned to see Erik and Mendez running from between the rocks of the cliffs across from them. Relief, even in the face of the thing in front of them, washed over him. He grabbed Lauren’s hand and tugged her away from the monster and toward the guys.
The whir of wings behind them reminded Ian of an electric knife. As he and Lauren reached Erik and Detective Mendez, that buzzing sliced the air by his ear. He felt a cold graze of pain over his shoulder blade and down his back. The shock more than the pain drove him down on one knee and the buzzing sailed above him. He tried to stand but the pain in his back was immense. Already, the left side of his back was growing cold and tacky with the blood seeping through his torn shirt.
“Ian!” Lauren skidded in the dirt and turned back to him, a look of concern on her face. She didn’t even see the claws descend and dig into her shoulders, scraping to gain purchase around her arms, and he didn’t have time to get to her before the thing lifted her up off the ground. Lauren screamed again, struggling and evidently discovering this made things worse. She whimpered, her hands scratching at the claws, trying to pry them loose. Blood bloomed at her shoulders and spread down the front of her top.
“Help me! Detective Mendez, please! Ian! Erik! Somebody—ow!”
Mendez pulled his gun and aimed at the beast, but hesitated in firing.
“Do something!” Ian shouted, rising to his feet with a painful groan.
“I can’t!” Mendez said, keeping the gun trained on the monster. “I’l
l hit her!”
The beast lurched upward and Lauren cried out in pain. She closed her eyes as the wings whirred faster and the creature lifted her again.
Then the monster jerked mid-air with a bellow of pain and anger, and then dropped Lauren clumsily to the ground. It landed with a heavy thump on the ground next to her. She began to shake all over, crying and kicking between the thing’s wings while simultaneously crab-scuttling away from it. Ian ran to Lauren and held her as she cried. He peered over the bulk of the thing to see what had taken it down.
A small woman with frizzy brown hair, clothes torn and face smudged with red dirt, both hands gripping the sharpened stick that now protruded from the center of the beast’s mouths, muttered, “Fucker,” and spit at the thing.
“Anita!” Mendez ran to her scooping up her little frame in his arms and crushing her to him, pelting the top of her head with kisses. “Dios mio, I thought I’d never see you again.” When he pulled her back, her eyes were red and wet with tears.
“Cora?” she whispered.
“She’s fine. Alive and well and cute as ever.”
“Oh thank God.” Anita’s voice, scratchy with grit and choked with emotion, broke into sobs of relief. Mendez pulled her tightly to him again. Muffled into his chest, she said, “Thank God. They told me....” She seemed unable to finish.
“They lied. The baby is fine.”
Erik, Lauren, and Ian let her cry out her relief, let Mendez hold her until he felt secure in her realness, in his having found her. When the two finally pulled apart, Erik said, “Let’s get the hell out of here, huh?”
Chapter 13
Ian helped Lauren and Mendez helped Anita as they followed Erik toward the rocky valley where he and Mendez had made their way back to the courtyard. They needed to rest, to regroup someplace where nothing could hurt them. So far, the valley, even with its ever-present threat of falling rock, was still the safest and most reliable place they had been in that world.
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