by Tim Powers
“Five and five!” she yelled into the wind.
Vickery found himself imagining a pair of dice, both showing fives. Ten was a hard point to make, in craps. “Two to one against,” he said.
“What?” There was panic in her voice. “Five and five, dammit!”
“Sorry!” He shook his head and took a deep breath. “Ten! What’s two and two?”
She didn’t answer. An updraft mounting from below the cliff lifted them as the plateau and the factory turned and receded below; and the factory was imploding. The smokestacks bowed and broke up as they struck the roof, and sections tumbled away in a froth of cascading masonry. Erupting dust clouds dimmed the scene, and then the dust was pulled downward as the entire top of the hill abruptly sank into the plain, in turn throwing up a thousand-yard-wide ring of dust and sand. Several seconds later the gritty, blinding cloud whipped up past them, rocking the wing and tilting its nose up, threatening a stall. Vickery felt Castine’s muscles flex, and guessed that she was getting a dislodged foot back onto the control bar.
“Tell him to slow down!” she gasped. “That was a red light!”
Vickery was trying to blink dust out of his eyes as he flexed his right arm to pull himself toward the nose, and he yelled, “Lean forward!”
Castine must have done as he said, for the nose came down and the wing picked up speed, now flying at a downward angle. Vickery wished he could free a hand to wipe across his eyes, but when he was able to squint ahead, he saw that the waist of the ghost tornado now stood squarely in front of them. The constant textured stadium sound was clearly coming from it, and was louder.
Doing math in their heads, with no physical referents, didn’t seem to be working; so Vickery yelled, “What’s the shape of our wing?”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw her glance up. “Delta,” she said, “about forty degrees.” The turbulent fringe of the tornado was only seconds away, but she gave him a quick approving nod.
“Hang on and brace your feet!” he yelled, and then the downdraft around the funnel tugged at the frame, and they were descending fast; Vickery had to push hard upward on the diagonal bar to keep his feet on the control bar.
The wing was tipping to the right, away from the whirling funnel that was so close, and Vickery’s chest went cold—he couldn’t brace himself to lean the other way, and the wing was about to slip into a sideways uncontrolled fall into the abyss of the Labyrinth—
But another wing was slanting in toward the tornado now, an orange one, on a rising and intersecting course. Vickery recognized it, and helplessly tensed himself for a collision and fall.
But when the other wing was ten feet below Vickery’s control bar, it abruptly halted in the air, its orange fabric denting concave, as if it had come up against a repulsive force; and Vickery could feel that his own wing had been pushed upward—only a momentary jar, but it was enough to bring his right wingtip up and for him to be able to throw his weight to the left. The wing came back to level, and tilted past level to bank toward the funnel.
He glanced downward. The fabric of the orange wing had evaporated into fleeting streams of orange smoke, and Vickery could just make out a tiny figure spinning away below.
Amanda had saved them from the same fall—deliberately?
He tore his gaze away and looked ahead—and the rushing mottled substance of the tornado was directly in front of him.
All at once there was weight on his feet and the diagonal bar was nearly yanked out of his hand. The wing was in the whirling funnel now, and though he couldn’t immediately make sense of the patches of light and dark that flickered around him, he could feel that the wing was rapidly spiraling upward. The wind battered his ears with a racket like tropical bird calls.
His voice was hoarse as he yelled to Castine, “Hold this angle!”
“What angle?” she called back desperately. Her right hand was clamped tightly around his ribs. She nodded upward. “What’s our wingspan?”
After an instant’s surprise, Vickery realized that she was keeping him grounded with natural math. “Thirty-seven feet!” he said, almost smiling.
And he forced his eyes to focus—to his right through a veil of turbulent distortion he could now see the Labyrinth’s hills moving past in the distance, and to his left, over Castine’s ruffling hair, flailing forms rushed downward in the funnel’s core, which in a mundane tornado would be the condensation vortex.
“Just,” he yelled, “let’s don’t fall in or out.”
And in fact it was not possible to hold one angle without the risk of tipping into one of the downdrafts on either side; Vickery found himself constantly leaning to one side and then the other to keep the wing in the funnel’s corkscrew upward current. There were no landmarks or visible horizon, and the spiral wasn’t steady—several times he had to lean across Castine, or swing outside the diagonal bar on his side, to keep the craft from falling into the downrushing core or out of the capricious funnel altogether.
“Altitude?” called Castine at one point.
“Three thousand feet!” he panted; he was almost certainly wrong, but the question had at least made him consider an actual quantity.
He could see that the jiggling forms around the wing were ghosts. Below him, and in front of him beyond the delta angle of braced vellum, grimacing faces and long-fingered arms curled and stretched and snapped, and he could now discern the individual voices and wails and laughter that made up the roar of the tornado. He caught fragments of sentences: don’t let him—did you see—wait in the car—to go home, to go home . . .
The light was dim and unsteady in the rushing spiral, but after a few squinting seconds Vickery was able to get some perspective. Farther away in the flock of flailing ghosts, ahead and below, he could see steady figures that held their humanoid forms for at least several seconds at a time, and he was briefly able to gauge his position by them; but the ones that spun closer to the wing blew apart in dissolving fragments.
He noticed one small figure that was constant, rushing along with the rest of them but maintaining a mid-air position perhaps six yards in front of the wing. He focused on it and saw that it was Mary, her straw hat fluttering behind her blonde curls, held on only by the drawstring.
Her open hands were held out in front of her, and she moved them toward the core; and a moment later Vickery had to lean hard in that direction to avoid being spilled right out of the funnel.
A thought flashed into his head: She’s giving me directions.
He nodded emphatically, and when she moved her hands again, he corrected his angle accordingly without waiting to see one or the other edge of the spiral looming up at him.
He spared a sideways glance at Castine, who nodded; and a second later, when Mary indicated a shift to the right, Castine leaned with Vickery.
Watching the little girl closely now as she hovered steady in the turbulence, Vickery could see that she was frowning in concentration, and her lips were moving; and now he could hear what she was calling: “When the ship began to sail, ’twas like a bird without a tail; when the bird began to fly, ’twas like an eagle in the sky . . .” She was sustaining her form and position by reciting her nursery rhyme.
The spiral’s angle was getting steeper—and just below the wired-together nose of the flexing wing, behind the diminutive figure of his daughter, he could now see the patch of blackness stippled with bright spots.
Stars! he thought. We’re nearly there!
He glanced to his left at Castine; she too was peering up in that direction, but after a few rushing seconds she leaned toward him and said, loudly, “No—it’s LA—from above!”
Mary moved her hands to the left, and he and Castine wrestled the wing back into line; and when he was again able to look beyond the little girl, he spent a full second making a mental snapshot of the lights in the blackness above.
And the headwind was cold on his suddenly sweating forehead. Yes, God help us, he thought as he returned his attention to Mary and
the noisy, harrowing current. If the two patches of light next to each other were Hollywood and downtown, the one to the north would be Burbank, and the dimmer one to the northwest would be Sherman Oaks or Universal City. And this time he had even seen faint lines connecting the variously bright pinpoints of light—those would be the long diagonal of the 5 Freeway, with the 134 branching off west from Hollywood.
But the lights were overhead.
Were he and Castine going to emerge from the tornado upside-down, at an altitude of something like 30,000 feet? Even as he kept his eyes on the steady little figure of Mary, he was rapidly calculating how they might right the wing, and then quickly dive out of the freezing and oxygen-depleted air at that altitude.
But when he was next able to look up, the freeway lines were gone, and the view beyond the nose was definitely the deep night sky, across which were spread the distinct stars of one particular constellation.
He exhaled in relief through clenched teeth.
A moment later Castine’s arm tightened around his ribs. “The bright one isn’t Hollywood,” she yelled in his ear. “It’s Aldebaran.”
Concentrating on leaning the wing back and forth according to Mary’s signals, Vickery just nodded.
“It’s the constellation Taurus,” Castine added.
And as soon as Vickery thought, Taurus—the bull, the view began to change. Two wavy streaks appeared where he had moments earlier thought he’d seen freeways, and the star that Castine had identified as Aldebaran was growing brighter.
Then he had to tug at Castine to lean far to the right, for he had been looking at the sky and not at Mary, and the wing had tipped dangerously toward the falling ghosts in the funnel core.
When he looked up again he simply stared in horrified astonishment.
Aldebaran was now a huge eye, and the long streaks were wavy horns, and fully half of the sky was eclipsed by a vast bull’s head staring directly down at the ascending wing. Vickery threw his weight forward, dislodging at least one of Castine’s feet, to judge by the sudden tug of her arm locked around his waist; but the bull’s face expanded and rushed closer.
Its enormous mouth dropped open, and then all sounds ceased and all light was extinguished. Vickery’s right hand lost its grip on the diagonal bar, and he was no longer standing on the control bar.
He was falling.
In complete darkness, his shoes hit pavement, and as he tumbled forward across a rough, dry cement surface, he heard the knock and thud of Castine falling and sliding to a stop beside him. The ensuing silence seemed to press at his ears. They had lost the wing, and even after several seconds he didn’t hear it hit anything. The surface he was now lying on was tilted slightly upward in the direction they were facing.
Over the pounding of his heart and his own harsh panting, he could hear Castine drawing ragged breaths nearby.
“I,” she gasped, “hear you breathing. Are we dead?”
Vickery braced himself up on his elbows, peering around uselessly. He coughed and then managed to say, hoarsely, “I don’t know.”
“That thing—swallowed us! Didn’t it?”
“I don’t know.” He flexed his hands. His palms stung from sliding on the concrete, but neither wrist was sprained. “Are you hurt?”
“Nothing broken, I think.” He heard cloth slide on the rough surface of the floor, and guessed that she had sat up. “Do dead people feel pain?”
“Sshh.” He was breathing as quietly as he could through his open mouth; a cold breeze smelling of alcohol and incense was in his face, and he tried to identify the faint sounds it carried. All he could think of was that they sounded like a massive person shifting constantly on a leather couch.
He got his feet under him and stood up carefully, stretching his hands to the sides for balance in the darkness, and his right hand brushed a vertical stone surface.
“You got a wall on your side?” he whispered. “I do.”
He heard more sliding from his left, and a faint slap. “Yes,” she whispered back.
He shuffled carefully in the downhill direction, brushing his palms along the flat stones of the wall, and after only a couple of feet he felt a corner: another stone wall extended out at right angles. He felt his way along it and came to a similar corner at the corridor’s other wall.
He stepped back and spread his hands across the wall that blocked this end of the corridor, and crouched to feel it all the way to the floor.
“Uh,” he said, “there’s a solid wall back here.”
“That’s impossible,” said Castine angrily. “We came from that direction.” Her shoes slid on the cement, and then he could feel her breath on his ear as she slapped the crossways wall.
She stopped, and after a few seconds she said, “What the hell do we do? Now?”
Vickery took a deep breath and let it out. “Walk uphill, I guess.” He reached around to his back and was reassured to feel the .45 semi-automatic still there, even though he was bleakly sure it would be of no use in whatever was happening here.
Further creakings sounded from the darkness in the other direction, with a measured, faint grinding that might have been something sliding at intervals across a floor, or might have been something big breathing. The sounds didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
“But—I don’t want to walk uphill,” whispered Castine.
“Ingrid, We can’t stay here. Not for long.”
Her hand brushed his arm, then clutched it tightly. “When I was a little girl in San Clemente,” she said, speaking quietly and rapidly, “one day all us kids had to get out of the surf because a shark was sighted, and we all came hollering up onto the sand.”
Vickery was straining to see anything in the darkness. “I imagine—”
“Wait! I was in Catholic school, and our teachers were nuns, fresh from Ireland, and one of them told us, ‘Girls, sharks are just as afraid of you as you are of them.’”
She let go of his arm, and he heard her step back toward the downhill wall. “But,” she whispered, “we knew that some things aren’t afraid of little girls at all.”
“We can’t run out of the surf,” Vickery told her gently.
For several seconds she was silent; then he heard her take a deep breath. “Sorry,” she said. “I know. I’m okay. Well, I’m not, but—” He heard her shuffle forward, and then her hand found his, and held it. “But dear God, where are we?” He felt her shiver. “Sorry, dumb question.”
“God only knows.”
“It swallowed us. I think we’re dead.”
“Maybe.” Vickery shook his head. “Would that make a difference?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The passageway uphill curved to the left, and soon Vickery could faintly see the stone walls by yellow light reflected from somewhere ahead of them, and he saw that Castine was limping.
A sound started up, making Vickery jump and Castine squeeze his hand; it was a long vocalized note, resonating as if in a big chamber; and when it wavered and stopped, it was followed by the same voice pronouncing a string of apparently nonsensical syllables.
If it can know stuff, Mary had said, it knows you’re here, inside it.
Castine moaned softly, but stepped forward when Vickery tugged at her hand.
The light was stronger ahead, and when a tall arch came obliquely into view Vickery paused and looked at Castine. Her forehead was scraped, and the knees of her jeans were torn. Her hair was a matted thatch.
“Enter two scarecrows,” she whispered tensely, then nodded toward the arch.
Still holding hands, they stepped to the arch. And they both flinched.
They were looking out across an aircraft-hangar-size chamber whose walls pulsed and foamed and shifted in streaks through shades of amber and gold, but their attention was fixed on the creature out there in the middle of the rippling floor, surrounded by a whirling ring of brightly glowing things that flapped through the cold air.
Vickery’s first shocked impression was that it was a
mastodon rolling, convulsing, on its back; then the tusks were long horns above a bestial snouted head, and a moment later the thing appeared to be a spiny black crab as big as a house, with an oversized human face at the front of it. The eyes were rolled back and the wide lips were opening and closing rapidly as the imbecilic syllables rolled out of it.
“Emilio?” cried Castine.
The crab-form shook and narrowed and grew taller, and then it was an enormous centaur, a man’s outsize torso and crossed arms mounted above a furred barrel chest and four stout legs that ended in hooves. The floor of the chamber was now jigsaw-cracked asphalt. Looking up at the thing, Vickery saw that the broad face had not changed, though two thick, ridged horns now curved out from the forehead. The creature was silent except for the voluminous rumble of its breathing, staring down at the pair of humans in the arch.
The walls of the chamber had solidified into an infinity of golden honeycomb cells.
The creature out on the floor—it wasn’t a centaur, Vickery realized; it had a bull’s body, not a horse’s—opened it mouth and spoke.
“Castine,” it said, and its voice was deep now. “Woods. You don’t—” The massive arms lifted and waved outward; “you don’t . . . prevent . . . consummation. You die—did die—”
It was pointing at the honeycomb wall, and when Vickery and Castine helplessly looked in that direction, one of the cells expanded in Vickery’s view and enveloped both of them.
And then he was in a desert under an overcast sky, able to see all around at once. To one side was a long dirt road with a gray car parked on the shoulder and a pickup truck approaching; away from the road, two men were pushing a third man ahead of them across the dirt and down a slope into an arroyo. The two men carried pistols, and the wrists of the man ahead of them were handcuffed behind him. The pickup truck nearly hit the parked car, but swerved around it and drove on past.
The pop of a single gunshot batted away across the desert, and then the two men were plodding back up out of the arroyo, holstering their guns.
