Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  Vickery nodded. “Mine turned into a bug.” He frowned. “Or a cigarette. Did I give it to you?”

  Castine frowned and closed her eyes; then in a firm voice recited, “Other friends have flown before—on the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.”

  The rhyme and trochaic meter cleared Vickery’s head, and he recognized the lines from Poe’s “The Raven.”

  He carefully pronounced the next line: “Then the bird said, ‘Nevermore.’”

  She was shivering. “Was Eliot just here? Oh God, I want to go home.”

  Mary had walked on ahead, and Vickery took Castine’s arm and hurried after her, setting each foot carefully in the loose sand and being careful not to let his eyes stray from the little girl, though the landscape tilted and spun in his peripheral vision. He and Castine took turns reciting lines from “The Raven,” soon having to repeat themselves since neither of them could recall the whole poem.

  At last Mary halted. A steady clanging and thumping was audible now on the wind.

  “That place on the hill,” Vickery panted, “things don’t change there.” Someone had told him that. He took a step forward, but his foot struck against something hard and he sprawled forward onto a set of wet wooden steps. A moment later Castine kicked the bottom step and halted.

  “This is your home,” came a new voice from above them.

  Vickery was kneeling on the second step, and he squinted up through the cold drops battering his face; and quailed. The stairway extended upward farther than he could see, but Amanda stood above him on the fifth step, wrapped in a sodden sheet that flapped in the wind, and Mary now stood beside her. Mother and daughter, he thought, that should have been.

  Amanda pointed down at Castine, who was standing behind Vickery. “I gave you the gun I killed myself with,” Amanda said to him. “Kill her now, let her go join her man among the rushing phantoms, and you stay here, partway up, with your family.”

  Over the drumming of the rain on the steps Vickery could hear Castine retching. “Sebastian,” she said, weakly. “Don’t.”

  “I’m—sorry,” said Vickery to the ghost of his wife. “I’m more sorry than I can say, for cheating you—both of you—but no, I won’t kill her.”

  “Infirm of purpose,” said Amanda’s ghost, extending one skeletal arm, “give me the revolver. A crime I punish, and a crime commit; but blood for blood, and death for death is fit; Great crimes must be with greater crimes repaid, And second fun’rals on the former laid.”

  “That’s the malmeme,” said Castine. “You shouldn’t listen.”

  But the meter and rhyme had gone some way toward clearing Vickery’s head. It’s more of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he thought. We must be close to the factory.

  As if to confirm the thought, the rain shifted and the mechanical pounding was more insistent.

  “Climb the stairs,” he said, and pushed himself up to get his feet onto the bottom step. Standing up in the downpour made him dizzy, but he leaned forward and set a foot on the next step, and then the other foot on the one above that. He could hear Castine’s shoes scuffing on the steps behind him.

  When he passed Amanda’s ghost she turned and stretched out her long-fingered white hands. “Canst thou throw off one,” the ghost wailed, “Who has no refuge left but thee alone?”

  “There is no refuge here,” he told her, looking back as he climbed higher, “for anyone.” Clenching his hands, he could feel that his wedding ring was no longer on his finger.

  Amanda’s ghost didn’t seem to be able to ascend any higher than the fifth step; Castine passed her and Mary followed Vickery, and as they climbed higher, from one splashing step to the next, Mary gave Vickery a desperate look. “The neighborhood,” she said, “shall justly perish for impiety: you two alone exempted; but obey, with speed, and follow where I lead the way: leave these accurs’d, and to the mountain’s height ascend; nor once look backward in your flight.”

  The wooden stairway curled between outcroppings of rounded sandstone, and the pounding from above was steadily louder. Through the shifting veils of rain, Vickery could see bumps and hollows in the surrounding wet stone; their shapes suggested noses and chins and mouths, but he looked away from them and concentrated on the planks under his shoes after he noticed that the mouth-holes were opening and closing.

  A wailing voice, and then a chorus, sounded from the plain below and behind them. “Don’t look back,” he said.

  “Right,” said Mary.

  “As if,” Castine gasped.

  The rain eventually stopped, or else they left it behind and below them, and the coiling clouds thinned. Vickery could now see a black wooden arch up at the top of the stairs, silhouetted against the bulls-eye rings of clouds in the brown sky. The boom and thump of machinery shook the steps.

  As he kept ascending, holding Castine’s elbow to steady her, cranes and rows of smokestacks edged into view above them, and then high brick walls crisscrossed with pipes and fretted with rows of tall, narrow windows.

  Mary halted and tilted her straw hat back to look up at Vickery. Her eyes were wide in her pale little face. “I stop here,” she said.

  “No,” said Vickery, “come on, it’s not much farther now.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t be, there.”

  “But can’t you—”

  Castine took hold of his shoulder. “She’s imaginary,” she told him, “and the factory is real—hyper-real, according to that old guy. What we find up there might save her from. . .” She didn’t finish the sentence, but Vickery knew she meant, from being consumed by the Minotaur.

  “Mary,” he said, “wait here, we’ll—”

  “Go,” the girl told him. “Nor once look backward in your flight.”

  Vickery hesitantly reached down and touched her cold cheek, then turned away from her and resumed the upward climb. The blurring of his vision was only tears, for when he blinked them away he was able to see the grain of the wooden steps and the mud-caked laces of his wingtip shoes with eerie clarity.

  It’s more real now, he thought nervously. Hyper-real. What had Laquedem said? Its field can eventually interfere with things like natural nerve function.

  Soon he and Castine were ascending the last steps up to the arch at the top, and as they passed through it they found themselves on a broad plateau. The wind was stronger up here, and they had to lean into it.

  Across a rutted, gravel-paved lot stood, at last, the factory. Vickery tilted his head back to squint at the crenellations and smokestacks along the high roof; then he lowered his gaze. A banded iron gate was recessed into the wall directly ahead; to the left of the gate a dozen huge steel wheels connected by coupling-rods rotated counterclockwise and then shuddered to a halt and turned the other way. To the right, three big exhaust fans spun in recessed circular openings in the wall, and beyond them a wing of the building projected onto a ridge that extended out past the end of the plateau, and a row of loading docks below high brick arches sat flush with a sheer drop.

  Like Hipple’s south-facing door, Vickery thought. He looked up.

  Towering even above and beyond the highest smokestacks, the constant sandy tornado shifted slowly from side to side. Vickery could see tiny human figures being whirled upward in it, and at the top, where the funnel met the sky, a small black disk turned slowly.

  Vickery’s vision was acute—he could clearly see striations in every piece of gravel underfoot, and every curl or pit of roughness in the bricks of the wall ahead of him. He swung his head to the left—Castine was beside him, staring intently at the high closed gate.

  He followed her gaze and noticed words in big brass letters over the black iron door: asciate ogne scelta voi ch’entrate.

  Castine pointed at the words. “That’s almost the inscription Dante had,” she said, speaking loudly against the wind and the mechanical thumping, “over the entrance to Hell, in the Inferno.”

  “What does it say?” asked Vickery.

  “The
first three words are supposed to be ‘Lasciate ogne speranza,’ which is ‘abandon all hope.’ But scelta is ‘choice,’ and asciate is . . . hew, chop. So altogether this says something like, ‘Chop off all choice, ye who enter here.”

  “The original first word was lasciate? I gather that must be the verb ‘abandon.’” He was pleased to note that his thinking was clear now, no longer battered by random diversions.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it was originally lasciate here, too.” He remembered Hipple’s description of the object Laquedem had brought back to the world in 1960. “Look, the inscription’s not quite centered now.”

  “Yes,” said Castine, “the first letter’s missing.” She looked at Vickery. “A big brass L. Laquedem took it, in 1960.”

  “That’s right. It should be, Abandon all choice, ye who enter here.”

  From the depths behind them sounded the bestial roar again, but it was tolerable up on the plateau, in the wind. Vickery only shivered at the memory of being immersed in it, dissolved in it.

  “We could probably take the A now,” he said, over the distant sound. “But . . . how can we get back to the world? Our abacus strings are gone.”

  Castine looked up at the immense clanking building. “Maybe we could make another pair of them here, out of something. If they were made of hyper-real stuff, they might not change away when we go back down into the . . . horribleness.”

  The distant inhuman bellow shivered to a halt, and it was followed by a closer crack and diminishing rumble. Looking back, Vickery saw the arch at the top of the stairway fold and fall away. Dust swirled up from the space below where it had stood.

  He walked back to the head of the wooden stairway, and the top two steps were all that was left; that whole side of the hill had sheared off and dropped away into the clouds below, leaving a raw, nearly perpendicular cliff.

  What had become of Mary? She had been only a little way down the stairs . . .

  Castine had edged up beside him; she peered over the brink, and stepped back. “Maybe we can get back to the world from up here?”

  Vickery stared down into the maelstrom. He thought he could see the river or highway, through the dust and the rain clouds. Mary doesn’t exist, he reminded himself; a fall can’t hurt her. I doubt if she even has the wherewithal to fall.

  Still, his forehead was cold with sudden sweat. He recalled that Castine had spoken, and he turned to her. “What?”

  “I said maybe we can get back to the world from up here.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out. “Two and two is four,” he said. “The square root of sixteen is also four.” He stretched out his hands, then shrugged and turned away from the abyss. “I don’t think math gets you out of this place. It doesn’t seem to be contrary, here.”

  He noticed something odd about the cracked-looking sky, and peered upward. Over the factory, the concentric rings of brown cloud broke apart as they converged toward the tornado, and the air above the factory was perceptibly clearer than the dusty haze everywhere else. After a few seconds he was able to make out the shape of the volume of air that broke up the moving clouds.

  “There’s a sort of cone,” he began, but Castine interrupted.

  “I see it. Perfectly clear air, like glass. It widens as it gets higher.”

  The pellucid cone over the hilltop was motionless, in contrast to the narrowing cloud rings and the dark, whirling, twisting tornado of ghosts just beyond it.

  Vickery started walking across the gravel yard toward the factory gate, relieved that walking in a straight line was easy here, and Castine’s footsteps were right behind him. When they were within a few yards of the gate, a section of gravel gave slightly under Vickery’s step, and the tall iron door swung inward, revealing a cement-paved courtyard.

  He took a last glance upward, and the edge of the clear cone, viewed nearly end-on, was clearly distinguishable; it enclosed the main building, though not the extension wing, and the open gate was inside it.

  Castine looked down, evidently having seen the same thing. “We can’t just stay out here,” she said.

  “We don’t have to abandon all choice,” he agreed. “It’s been taken away already.”

  He stepped across the threshold.

  And his thoughts blew away, leaving just a cold alertness. He had been aching with guilt about the apparitions of Mary and Amanda, but now all such illogical concerns were dismissed.

  The simplification was a relief.

  The courtyard smelled of motor oil and soap. The constant thudding of some immense unseen piston was now synchronized with his heartbeat.

  His first concern was his gun; he quickly reached behind him, and his hand felt the straight grip and the flat frame of the .45 semi-automatic, no longer the revolver. At the same time his gaze swung around the hundred-foot-wide courtyard, noting every detail of the artifacts crowded against the black brick walls: a dozen bicycles with iron wheels and wooden frames, suits of armor made of panes of stained glass, rows of six-foot-tall telescopes that dwarfed the antique Martini-Enfield rifles attached to them, old-fashioned washing machines with big cranks on the fronts and rollers at the tops . . .

  He was rapidly scanning each item to see if one would suggest a way of escaping from the Labyrinth, but none did. He stepped away from the woman who had come in behind him, Ingrid Castine, and he kept an unfocused wide-angle view of his surroundings as he reviewed his recent memories.

  The memories were largely corrupted with confusion, but he recalled the ghost of the woman with whom he had long ago had sexual congress, and the animate image of a girl that had never existed. These memories had no relevance, and he began instead to make a mental inventory of this building’s architecture, estimating likely locations of rooms and stairs.

  The Castine woman moved forward across the pavement, and his eyes were instantly on her, alert for any action that would threaten or hinder him. She was watching him, too. Facial expressions could be clues to imminent behavior, but her face showed none.

  Reasoning that this building probably contained many other manufactured objects, some of which might, on consideration, offer a means of returning to the world, he took a step forward, but halted when a five-second long series of musical sounds echoed around the courtyard in cadence with the unending mechanical pulse. The phrase was recognizably speech, but no more organic than words wrung out of a synthesizer. To Vickery the syllables sounded like Greek.

  A wooden knocking sounded overhead then, and Vickery looked up to see a tall figure, consisting more of brass and polished wood than of flesh, step out onto a railed balcony on the third floor. Its height from this angle was difficult to estimate, but it was certainly more than six feet tall. A broad pair of wings, made of leather stretched across rigid frames, spread out for several yards to either side of it, secured by leather straps across its chest, and hand-grips dangled from pulleys on its shoulders.

  The thing gripped the balcony rail with gloved hands and slowly inclined its face down toward Vickery and Castine. Its grotesquely oversized eyes were clocks with minute hands rotating rapidly counterclockwise behind the crystals.

  A part of Vickery’s mind had been expecting an encounter with the man or thing that Laquedem had called Daedalus the Artificer, and now he scanned the figure on the balcony with no emotion but cautious patience. In one corner of his mind he was aware that he would once have been uselessly awed at the sight of this millennia-old figure, prominent in classical mythology and still enduring here, in a perverse pocket of this non-world—but now Daedalus was just another factor in the situation.

  Recalling that Daedalus was apparently familiar with 17th century English, at least, Vickery called to it. “I have information you need. Come down here.”

  But the thing on the balcony was looking away now. It extended an arm made mostly of bamboo and wooden dowels, and then the musical tones of its voice started again, in a minor key, and this time the notes and stops and constrictions formed recogn
izable English words:

  “The hour is come when my o’er-labored breast surcease its care, by final sleep possessed. All things now end.”

  “You need to hear what I can tell you,” Vickery called again. Was the thing deaf?

  The figure didn’t move.

  Vickery stepped back, clearly to increase the distance between himself and the Castine woman, and looked upward, past the balcony. Above the factory’s highest catwalks and cranes he could see the surging top of the tornado, where the little black disk still rotated.

  And in a moment when the tornado bent away like a drawn bow, before it swung back again, he glimpsed white pinpricks in the black spot. Stars, he thought—the earthly sky at night.

  It’s not a disk, it’s a hole in this unnatural sky.

  That must be the opening between the worlds, he thought. It was a miscalculation to think I could find a way to walk back to it now, but—he looked again at the unresponsive winged creature on the balcony, and his right hand slowly moved behind his back and closed around the grip of the .45—but I’ll go by air, for sure the air is free.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The construct that Daedalus the Artificer had made of himself over the centuries spread its wings.

  In an instant Vickery had drawn his gun and pointed it up at the creature, estimating what spot on the segmented exoskeleton would be most vulnerable; but at the same time Castine had leaped aside, toward the eccentrically encumbered rifles, and was trying to yank one rifle free of the telescope it was attached to.

  Vickery spun to aim the gun at her.

  The rifle didn’t detach from the barrel of the six-foot-tall telescope, and the whole contraption toppled to the pavement with a clang and a crash of breaking glass. Castine dove to the pavement behind it for its scanty cover as her hand leaped into her pocket—but what she pulled out no longer had the appearance of a Swiss Army knife.

  It was again her original string with ten beads threaded on it.

  The figure of Daedalus had paused, and the brief snatch of its voice that followed ended on a rising musical note.