The Triumvirate

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “This way!” Mendez shouted, and veered off to the right. Erik and the others followed him up another wide stone staircase, this one leading first to the right, then banking sharply to the left. The terrace at the top of the staircase had a narrow arch and beyond it, an open veranda at the end of which floated another door.

  “Quick!” he shouted. “Get behind it!” The others dove for cover between the gray building and the slab of stone. Erik skidded to a halt alongside Mendez.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted.

  “I’m gonna open it!”

  “What? Are you crazy? What if there’s something worse behind—”

  One of the wraiths dug a long furrow down his back, sailed up into the night, and circled for a second attack. Another flew right into the building above the heads of the others and broke apart into wisps.

  Mendez tugged on the handle and the door flew open. There was a slight sucking sound as the ghosts dived for the open doorway. Screams echoed across the city as the phantoms all zeroed in on that terrace and funneled neatly into the space beyond the doorway. The momentum of their flow through the doorway pulled the heavy stone door shut behind them. Instantly, the empty skies were silent over the dead city.

  “How...how did you...?”

  “I didn’t,” Mendez told Erik, breathless. “Know, I mean. It was...just a gut feeling. If something else was in there, it would attack the ghosts. And if not, the emptiness would corral them again.”

  Erik looked at him skeptically.

  “I don’t understand it myself. I’m sorry; it was a pretty strong feeling, but I guess it was a pretty stupid thing to try.”

  Erik punched him lightly in the shoulder. “Risky, maybe. But what hasn’t been a risk here? And stupid? Hell no. You saved our lives, amigo. Muchas gracias.”

  Mendez grinned at him. “De nada.”

  The others, breathing hard and shaking, rejoined them.

  “I really, really want to go home,” Lauren whispered. Ian held her close.

  “We will,” Erik told her. “We will.”

  ***

  It took them almost half an hour to find the terrace from which they had released the ghosts. All around the city, the misty shreds lazed up from the street like smoke, dissipating in the breeze. Smears of tiny little pearlescent bubbles dried and popped against the sides of buildings and on arches and railings. They climbed the steps, exhausted, and trudged back to the open doorway.

  What they found was a yellow rectangle of open space and light, its edges thin and hard. Beyond it, Erik could see a room. It looked like a vault. Several marbled pedestals rose up from the ground, and on each of them was an object. An easy ten-foot drop from the edge of the doorway to the floor of the room looked promising. Erik climbed over the edge and dropped down into the room.

  “Erik, what are you doing?” Lauren asked, nearly hysterical.

  “I think...ow! I think we found something,” he called up to them.

  Mendez dropped beside him, and Ian followed, with Anita helping Lauren over the side, then dropping down herself.

  “So what are we looking at here?”

  “I think I know,” Ian said, looking around with fascination. “I think the rooms—I think they change, depending on which door is opened, and when.”

  “How’s that?” Mendez asked.

  “When we opened this door, it was like we’d opened the pen and let out a bunch of animals so crazed and so hungry they cannibalized each other. If you had to contain something like that, you might choose a vault...a mausoleum, maybe. Some kind of containment unit. But not an artifact room. Not someplace like this. And when Detective Mendez opened the other door, they flocked to it like it was inexorable. Whether because of the material of the place or the sense of familiarity and security, they had to return to a room. Therefore, whatever was behind the second door we opened, it was displaced and moved here.

  “And here,” Anita said slowly, “is an artifact chamber?”

  Ian jerked a thumb at a metal ball encased in glowing wires, with a thick twisted wire handle forming a question mark around its circumference. “Looks like. Artifacts from...well, anywhere, possibly. Anywhere at all.”

  “Do you think the one we want is here? How will we recognize it?” Lauren asked, excited. “Should we take them all?”

  “Ever see Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail?”

  “Huh?”

  Erik explained. “We don’t know what will happen in here if we pick the wrong one. For all we know, we ‘choose poorly’ like in the movie, and we wither and turn to dust. I think we should let Ian pick.”

  “Wait, what? Me?”

  “Sure,” Mendez said. “You’re the only one who can recognize the language the race from the other world used. You know more about ancient languages than any of us, and probably more about their culture, too. If anyone could make an educated guess about which artifact to take, it would be you.”

  Lauren took his hand and squeezed it. “You can do it. We all believe in you.” Softly, she added, “I believe in you.”

  Ian looked flustered but pleased. “Well, okay, if...if you really think....”

  “Go get ’em, tiger,” Anita said with a wink.

  Ian walked amid the pedestals, studying each of the objects on them carefully. One held a crystal v-shaped object with a tiny teardrop of light dangling between the prongs. Another looked to be an asterisk shape made of some kind of cloth and bound with bright red string. There was something that looked to be made of bone, carved into a double helix shape. Another, surprisingly, held a crucifix. Yet another displayed a glass wand-shaped item with fibrous prongs on either end. There were statuettes and figurines of alien shapes—probably gods—and one framed glass box inside of which swirled a miniature galaxy. But Ian paused the longest at one far off in the corner, checked a few others, and bee-lined right back to it. He seemed to be reading something on it, and he looked excited.

  “Uh, guys? I think I found what we’re looking for. This one here.”

  “Go on,” Erik encouraged gently. “Pick it up.

  Lauren gave him a thumbs up and a bright smile.

  He took a deep breath, exhaled, muttered something to himself, and picked up the figure.

  For a moment, no one spoke. Glances darted around the room, waiting for a reaction. There was none. It appeared, at least for the moment, that Ian had chosen wisely. They crowded around him to get a look at the thing.

  Ian held in his hand a figure of metal, fairly flat and completely symmetrical. It was vaguely cross-shaped, with a diamond shape encasing a tiny blue gem at the head and embellishments to either side that spread up around the head and out like wings. It reminded Erik a little of the tops of colonial archways. The body had a tribal design aspect to it, bars of metal flowing in and out of contact, intersecting and drawing apart, swirling and scrolling, until they eventually met and tapered to a point at the end. In the center of the piece was a metal triangle framing another tiny glittering gem, this one red.

  “It’s quite a piece of work,” Mendez said. “But how did you know to choose that one? What makes that the artifact we’re looking for?”

  Ian turned it over and showed them tiny marks carved into the back of the piece. The marks swam out of focus for a moment, then reshaped themselves into other symbols—the ones like those on the vault covers that Ian said were ancient Aramaic.

  “It was face-down, so this side was up. See, it’s an incantation of some kind,” Ian said. “A prayer, I guess. A spell. It calls on powers whose names can’t be spoken, but whose reach spans the multiverse. The incantation calls this a key. I think it’s what opens the portal to the Hollowers’ home world.”

  “You did it! You found it,” Lauren said, excited. She threw her arms around him and hugged him. Over her shoulder, Erik could see Ian blushing, and it made him smile. It reminded him of watching Jake and Dorrie when they first got together.

  “Good job, kid,” Mendez said. Ian gave him a gratefu
l grin.

  “So now, the question is: how do we get out of this place?”

  Erik nodded toward the doorway with a small smirk. “Plenty of doors to try.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Ian said.

  “Hey, man, I was just kidding.”

  “Yeah, but think about it. It can’t hurt to see if there are any inscriptions on the doors. Maybe one could lead us home—or closer to it.”

  “I don’t think I want to open up any more of those doors. Who knows what will fly out next?” Lauren hugged herself, looking worried.

  “I’ve got to agree with the guys here,” Anita said. “It’s that or strike out into that black desert. And frankly kids, I don’t have it in me to do that.”

  The others looked at Lauren.

  “Come on, what do you say?” Ian said to her with a warm smile.

  She melted a little. “Okay. Let’s find us a way home.”

  “How about Mendez and I get up there first, so we can help the rest of you? Ian, would you mind helping the ladies from down here?”

  “No problem,” Ian answered, putting the artifact into one of his deep pants pockets. “Think you guys can get back up there okay?”

  “I think so.” Mendez gauged the height, looked around, spied the pedestal on which the artifact had rested, and dragged it, with care not to knock into the other pedestals, over to the doorway. It looked heavy, but Mendez managed to maneuver it carefully across the room and into position.

  Mendez held onto it while Erik boosted himself up onto it and back up to the doorway. Ian did the same for Mendez. From the terrace, where the air had grown cool, the two men helped Lauren and then Anita, taking their arms and hoisting them up from the pedestal as Ian held it still below. Then Ian pulled himself up on it. It wiggled once and he froze, trying to redistribute his weight and regain balance. After a moment, the pedestal stopped rocking, and he exhaled a sigh of relief. Mendez and Erik reached it and quickly hauled him out.

  Once they were all safely back on the terrace, they looked out over the city. Erik imagined that at one time, it was probably very beautiful, but now, the emptiness of it made it more haunting than magnificent. Again he looked out on a number of slab doors like the ones they had opened. He hadn’t noticed any kind of writing on any of them before and didn’t see any now. But, he reasoned to himself, this world had a strange way of changing once a guy thought he knew what was what, so maybe some kind of writing, either on a door or wall or sign or something, might make itself known yet.

  To the others he said, “If Ian is right about the contents of rooms switching, then maybe we should close this door before opening another one, so we don’t have to keep backtracking to the last door’s location. What do you think?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Ian replied, and the others nodded agreement. He and Erik got on the far side of the door while Mendez waited near the doorway to see if it would need to be pulled as well. With a light push, the door swung closed without a sound.

  No words, not on this door, at least. It was again one of many free-floating slabs of stone, its handle only a strange and random adornment.

  “Where do we start? Should we just go to the next closest one and work our way around?” Anita indicated the door on the terrace across from them with a lift of the chin. “That one?”

  Erik looked at Ian. “What do you think?”

  Ian looked out over the street to the door Anita had pointed out. “I think it’s as good a plan as any. Just so long as we don’t open the one with all the ghosts....”

  “That’s down the street away,” Mendez said. “It was pretty hectic, but I think I’ll remember it if I see it. If I’d thought of it then, I would have tried to mark it somehow.”

  “Wait! I think I have an idea,” Lauren said, feeling her earlobes. One showed nothing but a tiny hole, but the other had a diamond stud in it. She removed it and held it up. “Gift from an old boyfriend. He said they were real diamonds. Let’s see about that.”

  She went over to the door and dragged the diamond side of the earring down hard against its surface. It left a long scratch. She smiled in triumph. “At least Barry was good for something,” she said. She made a simple star shape out of the scratch.

  “Great! On to the next one.” Erik smiled at her.

  They descended the staircase, joking with each other and laughing for the first time. It felt really good to Erik. It felt secure. It reminded him of the bond he’d shared with Dave and Cheryl, as if they had known each other for years. He wondered again if that was coincidence or some aspect of the situation they were all in, and found he didn’t care. Sometimes, he thought, you just have to take something for what it is and enjoy it while you have it. And what it was, for Erik, was a break from worrying, regardless of their strange surroundings, regardless of the uncertainty of the future. They were dirty, bloody, tired, and hungry, but they were laughing, and damn, it felt good.

  They circled around one of the bullet-shaped buildings whose large roof-fin blocked out a fan of moonlight, ducked under a low arch, and found the base of the staircase leading up to the terrace. This staircase had a silver railing which caught the muted blues and greens of the city lights and twirled them into little slips along its length. The wide stairs had been gilded with the same silver along the edges. They reached the top and saw the slab-door floating above stones laid out in fan patterns and hemmed by a silver railing like the one on the stairs.

  The Triumvirate stood on the terrace next to the door.

  The laughter stopped. Erik felt a sheath of icy panic coat his chest and stomach.

  “No. Oh no, come on. No, no no,” Ian said. Behind him, Lauren paled. Mendez clutched Anita in a tight grip.

  In this world, as on Earth, the Hollowers looked somehow superimposed, as if their lines and contours didn’t quite fit or flow against the backdrop behind them.

  “Found you,” the left one said.

  Chapter 16

  Before Erik and the others could run, the Triumvirate and the door were a mere couple of feet away. The three in unison turned their heads toward the door and it swung open. At first, Erik could see nothing but white through the doorway, but he smelled the faint odor of ozone which lately turned his stomach. Something amorphous was moving inside the white, swimming, rising, falling, turning in circles as it drew closer.

  “Please don’t,” Lauren said. She sounded small and scared, Erik thought, and exhausted.

  A wind had picked up behind them, carrying strands of their hair and flaps of their clothing toward the doorway. Erik tried to turn but found the wind made it difficult to move his head. He tried to lift an arm and found it pushed forward. The wind was growing more insistent; Erik’s sneakers skidded on the fan of terrace stones as he was pushed forward.

  “Hey,” Ian said, stumbling toward the door, then bracing his legs against the force behind them.

  “Jesus!” Mendez reached for the staircase railing, but the force of the wind yanked his hand back and he, with his arm still around his wife, tumbled forward. It was then that Erik realized the wind wasn’t pushing from behind them but pulling from in front—the doorway was exerting a kind of suction force which he imagined was similar to the force that had sucked those vicious, cannibalistic ghost-things back into their vault. Erik hoped to God the Hollowers weren’t sucking them into some death vault, for their bodies to die and decompose while their hungry spirits, trapped for eons, waited restless and angry for someone to let them out. That would be a fate worse than death—nothing short of hell.

  He didn’t have long to think about it, though, because the Triumvirate said something in a language he couldn’t understand and the pull on them grew stronger. Lauren screamed as she was lifted off the ground, and a second later she flew through the doorway into the limitless white.

  “Lauren!” Ian cried, and his reach for her, however futile, was enough to lift him up into the air too. He sailed head-first past them and through the doorway. Mendez reached again for the stai
rcase railing and lost his footing; he and Anita stumbled backward and were sucked in as well.

  The Hollowers stood watching him with their sightless, eyeless heads, their hate an unpleasant taste in the sucking air between them, a painful prickle across the skin. Erik, afraid to move, tensed his leg muscles and ducked his head, bracing himself against the pull toward oblivion.

  “You,” the left one said. “You are anathema. And you will die first.”

  The middle one repeated the words in the language Erik didn’t understand, accompanying them with gestures of a black glove, and Erik was shoved hard from behind and lifted off his feet. He tried grabbing the edge of the doorway as he hurtled into the white but missed. Behind him, he heard a swift thud of moving stone, and then all was blurred to colorlessness.

  ***

  About a minute passed where there was no sense or feeling, and Erik couldn’t immediately tell if he had been conscious or not. When the white cleared away, there was no jarring thump, no disorientation. He, Mendez, Anita, Ian, and Lauren were all standing in Mrs. Coley’s room at Lakehaven Psychiatric Hospital. Each of them wore the same confusion in their faces that Erik felt. With the confusion came suspicion that dampened hope. They appeared to be back on Earth. Damn, he wanted to be back on Earth. But the experience of crossing back through the dimensions to get back was so different than the other times that Erik couldn’t help but wonder if it was a trick. Were the Hollowers playing mind games with them again? Were they really back, or was this yet another world, twisted out of shape to look like home? To give them a taste of home and then yank it away again?

  For several seconds, no one spoke. Mendez went into the room’s small bathroom and turned on the water faucet. At the sound of the lightly rush of water, the others crowded in the doorway.