by Tad Williams
But the thing didn’t like water, right? And here we were running a few feet above San Francisco Bay. I seriously considered just diving over the railing into the shallow tidal inlet in the hope we could save ourselves that way, but I had no idea how deep the water was—perhaps only a few feet—and how much the creature actually disliked H2O, and I wasn’t keen on finding out both things when it was too late to try anything else.
I put on a burst of speed and caught up with Sam. “I’m going to try something,” I said or tried to, through my gasps for breath. “Whatever you do, don’t stop running.”
To his credit (or as evidence of how fucked we were) Sam didn’t even argue but only lowered his head and tried to coax another few mph out of his legs. I snuck a glance back over my shoulder and saw that the monster was far enough behind us for me to turn and drop into a shooter’s crouch, which I did. The Five-Seven is a light gun, but I took a shooter’s stance and braced it with my other hand, because I was trembling so damn hard, then did my best to draw a bead on one of those two fiery red eyes coming toward me like the headlights of some hell-truck. Silver might not kill it, but I was wondering what it might think about getting a bullet-sized chunk of the stuff right in the eye—and maybe, if I was lucky, right through and into whatever served it as a brain.
But I wasn’t lucky. The thing didn’t slow down, and its footsteps made the slats of the old bridge jump and shake beneath me as I squeezed the trigger. The ghallu straightened up as I fired, my gun jounced low, and instead of giving it one in the eyeball I saw a fiery gout of something burst out near its knee.
The ghallu lurched and lost its rhythm for a second, throwing back its head as it staggered and letting loose a rumbling sound of fury (and pain, I devoutly hoped) as loud as an avalanche of scrap metal. I fired again and hit it in the chest, and it slapped at the molten wound, not mortally hurt but pained and distracted. Then it stumbled and crashed into the railing, shattering the redwood two-by-fours into splinters as it toppled flailing into the water. As it cannonballed into the bay a hissing cloud billowed up toward the moon and blotted my view.
I stood staring for a long second, wondering if I might actually have killed it, but then the great beast staggered upright, water bubbling violently off its skin and fizzing into steam. The brackish water barely reached the ghallu’s knees, and it was already wading back toward the footbridge like a ground-hugging cloud. It roared again. This time it sounded like it was spitting out bay water, but that didn’t make the noise any prettier.
I was already sprinting after Sam as the horned cloud began to climb back onto the flimsy bridge where it had broken through. When I looked back, the broken boards were smoldering in its clawed hands, then a moment later a long section of the railing simply broke away and the creature slipped back into the shallow water. It hissed and slashed at the unresisting tide with its hands and horns, then waded sullenly forward, looking for a better place to climb out so it could catch us and shred us.
So much for killing it with the San Francisco Bay.
Still, the beast clearly didn’t like water, and enough of the stuff might at least take away much of its heat—any pain it caused the ghallu would be a bonus. Maybe it would even make the monster more vulnerable to silver.
Yeah, I thought, and maybe astronauts and cowboys will appear and save me.
I had two, maybe three of my expensive bullets left, so all I could do was try to think of some way to improve the odds a little and hope that Fate was done rubbing little Bobby Dollar’s face in his own stupidity.
A few moments later, with the steaming horror still dragging its bulk back onto the bridge, we were off the walkway and into the ruins of Shoreline Park. We dashed up the Little Promenade between the dilapidated shells of what had once been restaurants and shops meant to lure the park’s customers before they even reached the main events.
Some abandoned amusement parks have an eerie, haunted charm as nature in the form of trees and vines reclaims them, climbing over the skeletal rides, transforming them into a modern version of a Victorian folly, an artistic comment on the frailty of Man’s works. The commentary on Shoreline Park was a little less subtle. In the years since the park closed down for good it had become a wasteland in every sense of the word; a haven for seabirds, crackheads, and any homeless folk who could manage the hike from the mainland and didn’t mind living with broken glass and sharp rusted things underfoot. The walls that still stood were splashed with graffiti, both the formal tags of local gangs and others so crude and desperate that they looked more like the markings of animals, spray paint splattered mindlessly like blood and vomit—both of which were also splattered here, as my senses forcefully told me. A little patch of Hell on earth. Nice place to make a last stand.
Sam had slowed, and I joined him in a heavy, painful trot. Even our angelic bodies were pretty nearly tapped out. “Which way?” I gasped.
“I don’t know. I can’t take you where I was going to—that thing’s too close.” He looked blank and strange; I couldn’t even guess at what he was thinking. We had been like brothers, Sam and I, or at least I had thought so. Now I realized I scarcely knew him. How had we come to this?
Sam pointed off to the right. “The woods are over there,” he said, meaning the southern part of the island, the original turn-of-the-century park before the amusements were built, once a spot for picnics and family outings. “And the parking lot,” he said absently, as if trying to remember where we had left our car.
“Two good places to get slaughtered,” I said between ragged breaths. “But not what I was hoping for.” I wiped sweat out of my eyes and looked ahead to the amusement park section—“Merryland,” as it had been officially named, although no one had called it that for a long time before Shoreline Park actually closed. All I could see of it from here was the top of the Whirlaway and the wheel, but that was enough. The idea of trying to hide from a murderous Sumerian demon amidst that wreckage might have thrilled a movie’s art director, but it left me cold. Not to mention it would take us another five minutes or more to reach it—time I didn’t think we could afford. I pointed to our left beyond the row of ruined storefronts. “Are the baths still over there on the north side?” The howl of the demonic thing pursuing us rose into the darkness behind us once more. Even after all this time that sound grabbed me by my primordial shorthairs, and I could almost feel the last drops of my courage leaking out. “Sam?”
“Yeah. But I don’t know if there’s any water in them.”
“Then start praying.” I darted down a narrow alley full of broken, rusted chairs and bits of fallen masonry that the bay air had spent busy years covering in mold. I ran as fast as I could manage for the Kingsport Plunge, the abandoned swimming complex where flappers and their straw-hatted swains had once come to sun and swim beside the bay. We emerged from the shelter of the ruined buildings, and the moon dripped enough light for us to make our way between the long-abandoned spa pools, just so many empty cups now with scummy water and debris littering their bottoms like tea leaves waiting to be read. A few more steps and I could make out the shadowy lip of the outdoor pool, a concrete pit the size of a football field. Once diving towers, lifeguard stations, and refreshment stands had stood around it like Renaissance towns around a lake, but time and weather had swept them all away. Now only the outdoor Plunge itself remained, a Bauhaus Grand Canyon made of cement, but as we reached the side I could see that there was nothing in the bottom of it but a foot and a half of rainwater and a graveyard of rusted poolside recliners.
Well, that was just wonderful. Maybe the ghallu would step on something nasty while it was eating us and get tetanus.
“The indoor pools,” Sam panted. “If you want water, I think they’re still fed from the bay. Maybe someone left the sluices open.”
Just then I heard a sound like bombs going off and turned. The monster had climbed onto one of the shops behind us, smashing the remnants of its roof as it scrambled toward the edge. It saw us then and
leaped down as quickly as a cat (if cats came in combine-harvester size) then began to close the ground between us, leaping over the cement pits of the empty therapy pools.
Nobody had bothered to put a lock on the indoor pool, and we slammed through the door and into the echoing space. The reason it was open quickly became apparent. It might have been an indoor pool once, but the roof had been made of something less permanent than the walls and had long since rotted away. The ceiling was nothing but a basket of rusted metal spars, completely open to the sky, but even so the place still stank of urine and human feces and rotting dead things.
Even as we ran across the slippery tiles, I saw that for once Fate had smiled on me, or at least not simply flipped me the bird: as Sam had guessed, there was water in the indoor pool, gleaming darkly where the moon touched it through the tangle of rusted struts. In fact, the pool was nearly full.
But the moon wasn’t the only thing above us. A large shadow appeared at the edge of the roof and sprang down, less like a cat or a toad this time than like something with lots of legs dropping onto its prey. It crouched in the shadows, temporarily shapeless, but I could see the burning eyes, and it could just as obviously see me.
Then Sam slipped and fell, cracking his head hard against the floor, and before I could slide to a stop, struggling to keep my balance on the filthy, muddy tiles, I was a dozen feet past him. Sam lay on the ground, not moving. The ghallu came toward us with horns down and arms spread. I wasn’t sure how many shells I might have left in my gun—two, maybe three if I was lucky—but I stepped toward the thing.
“Hey, you—ugly!” I shouted. “You don’t want him, you want me!”
It actually stopped, tipping its wide-pronged head like a dog.
“Come on and try me, you ancient bastard! Come and taste the twenty-first century!”
It sprang over Sam as if it had meant to do that in the first place. Something that big should never be that fast—never. I realized it was going to be on me before I could even get traction again, so I fired. With no time for careful placement I just aimed for the shadowy center of it and pulled the trigger, then squeezed off another for good measure. I saw both bullets hit and the thing shuddered as the silver pierced it, slowing its loping progress to a stumble. Sprays of molten orange leaped like sunspots from its torso, but the bullets didn’t kill it any more than meteors would kill the sun. All that those shots did for me was allow me time to get my feet under me again, so I could scramble toward the dark indoor plunge and leap in.
Sam had been right about another thing: the pool was full of salt water from the bay—but that wasn’t all. Left open to the elements and only the Highest could guess what other kind of filth, the water smelled like sewage and clung like oil. Floating branches and other debris tangled my arms as I swam. I wasted no time on the aesthetics, but paddled as fast as I could to the deep end where the chipped tiles still faintly read “12”—twelve feet, I hoped, not “Lane 12” or something equally useless. When I got there I turned, treading water, trying to keep my gun out of the muck, and waited.
I didn’t wait long. Growling and rumbling, the huge thing scrabbled along the side of the pool for a moment as if gauging whether it could reach me from there, then leaped into the murky water. A geyser of steam vomited into the air.
It was fast in the water, too. It came toward me like a shark, just a dark bulge beneath the water’s surface. To my horror, I learned that simply because something hates water doesn’t mean it can’t swim. Instead of staying and waiting for it, I dove down and felt the creature pass just above me in a wave of scalding heat and furiously bubbling froth, its flames doused but its skin still hot as a branding iron.
The ghallu turned then and dug back toward me, too far up for me to slip past it to the surface. I did my best to ignore the foul water burning my eyes as I tried to kick out of the monster’s way, but I wasn’t fast enough and a moment later it was right over me.
I am no Olympic swimmer. My superiors gave me a good body, but not Superman’s. The ghallu had speed and strength far beyond any human frame, even one on loan to an angel. As I tried to dart away again it reached out and caught me—I could feel the skin of my ankle blistering. I did my best to turn and shoot at it, hoping I had one round left and that the Five-Seven would fire underwater, but some garbage floating in the pool had tangled itself with my trigger finger, and before I could get it untangled the monster yanked me toward it and dragged me upward.
It was dangling me upside down by one leg as it surfaced and thrashed its way toward the shallower end where it could stand up. The demon-beast’s skin was black, smooth as a dolphin’s, and smelled like melting rubber and sulfur. Even soaking wet the thing was painfully hot, and as it stood there dripping, up to its belly in the water, little flames began to run along its head and shoulders as the remaining moisture steamed away. I fought with my remaining strength but couldn’t wriggle loose. The pain of my ankle was so intense that I could only pray that there really was one bullet left so I could put it into my own skull and end the agony. The ghallu had dived into a full pool and swallowed a pound of silver and still barely broke stride. I had nothing else to try.
Helpless. That’s the word.
But instead of ripping my head off or burning me to ashes, the ghallu lifted me up and began to open its mouth, which kept opening and opening until it was a gaping hole, its distended lower jaw almost touching its chest. This time, instead of flames, I saw nothing inside it—nothing. Not the emptiness of an open gullet, but the void itself, belching out empty, freezing cold despite the heat of the ghallu’s body, a bottomless pit stinking of oblivion. And then I realized that this demon wasn’t going to carry me back to Eligor, it was going to send me back. It was going to swallow me right down that horrible throat into Hell.
I struggled to get my gun up, but the thing was clutching me against its chest and I couldn’t lift my arms above my shoulders. The tangling object wrapped around my trigger finger slid into the palm of my gun hand. It was Caz’s silver locket, hard and smooth against my skin. Her parting gift…or her last lie. It seemed appropriate that it had kept me from firing. Then I suddenly realized what it was made from.
When Orban warned me how tough the ghallu was, how hard it would be to kill even with the bullets he’d just sold me, he’d said I’d need something more: “Not just ordinary silver. Special.” What else did I have with even a chance of fitting that bill? But Caz’s locket was only special if it meant something—if I let it mean something. I had to believe there was a reason it was in my hand in that moment, not lying in the debris at the bottom of the pool. Which meant…what? Faith?
All this flashed through my head in an instant as the thing began lifting me toward its cold-steaming maw. As the stink washed over me, I could feel the monster’s fingers cracking my ribs even as they roasted my skin like a Christmas goose. In between screams of pain I kicked the monster as hard as I could but it was like kicking a steam shovel. Still, I somehow managed to work my other hand loose and grabbed the little silver locket, then pressed it against the hot, rubbery expanse of the ghallu’s chest, right where its heart should be if it had one. I rammed the barrel of the automatic against the locket, said a prayer that didn’t really have any words—mostly that I still had a bullet in the chamber—and pulled the trigger.
The blast rocked me as if I’d been struck by lightning. I felt the pit-spawn’s molten blood spurt burning onto my chest as the creature roared and thrashed, then it flailed through the scummy water toward the side of the pool, flinging me away as if I no longer mattered. I narrowly missed the concrete lip, landed hard against the tiles, and slid to within a few yards of the place where Sam lay. The ghallu was making terrible sounds, bending where no living thing should bend, writhing as though it was tearing itself apart inside, but it managed to pull itself out and crawl close enough to us that its huge, twitching black fingers nearly closed on me before it finally stopped moving.
I watched it long enough
to make certain it was dead, or whatever happened to things like that when you shot them in whatever passed for their important organs, then I fell back and stared up at the broken ribs of the roof, gasping and shivering uncontrollably. My sides were on fire and my ribs stabbed at me every time I breathed. The gun was still clutched in my hand like a wrecked ship’s spar in the grip of a drowned man. I may even have cried for a moment before I rolled onto my side and puked up a belly’s worth of whatever had been in that horrible pool, then I surrendered to the darkness growing in my head.
Sam was stirring beside me when my brain began to work again. He didn’t ask any questions, but his eyes got appropriately wide when he saw the immense black shape of the dead ghallu, the last thin wisps of steam rising from its skin as its internal furnaces shut down.
“Somebody gave me a gift,” I offered by way of explanation. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Sam rolled over and sat up, holding his head as though his hands were all that was keeping it attached. “I know we need to talk, Bobby,” he said at last. “Let’s get out of here. My place. We can clean up, get something on those burns, then I’ll tell you everything.”
We both heard the telltale sound of a gun being cocked. It echoed from the walls of the roofless hall as if someone had banged on them with a stick.
“No, I think you’d better talk right here, Sammariel,” a voice said. “Because I really want to hear this. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got a gun. And I’m pretty sure I’ve also got the only bullets in the room.”
thirty-eight
the third way
“YOU?” I said. “Really?”
Clarence looked at me but he kept the strange little gun pointed at Sam, which didn’t really make sense. “Surprised? Or disappointed?” He was playing it very tough, but there was a telltale tremor in his gun hand.
