by Tad Williams
She guessed that was the name of the game. The people were swinging sticks at each other. "I don't know. It's interesting."
"Well, I'm going to lie down for a few minutes. Your mom should be calling in a quarter of an hour, so if she doesn't call, come wake me, okay?" He pointed at the clock in me corner of the wallscreen. "When that says 17:50, okay?"
"Okay, Daddy." She watched him walk into the bedroom, then switched back to Teen Mob. The people on the show always seemed to be talking about who was dancing with who—dances she hadn't heard of, like "Shoeboxing" and "Doing the Hop." Someone said "Klorine will play Bumper Cars with anything in sprays," and Christabel wasn't sure if they were talking about another dance or real bumper cars, even though there hadn't been any on the show, because someone else said, "Yeah, and that's why she's always getting hurt," which sounded more like cars than dancing. She turned off the wallscreen.
It didn't seem fair. Mister Sellars was sick, maybe dying, and they didn't even call a doctor. What if he needed some medicine to get better? Mommy was at the store buying things, but Christabel knew you didn't get real medicine at the grocery store, just fruit-flavored cough medicine and things like that. When you were really sick, like Grandma Sorensen, you had to have medicine from the drugstore, or even go to the hospital.
She wandered around the room, wondering if she could go and talk to Mister Ramsey. Mommy wasn't supposed to call for another ten minutes and Christabel felt like that would be the longest ten minutes ever in the world. And she was hungry, too. And even more bored than sad. She thought she should have gone to the grocery store with her mother.
She was looking in her daddy's coat pocket for the pretzels he had taken away from her that morning because she wasn't supposed to have pretzels for breakfast, when she found the Storybook Sunglasses.
She was surprised a little, because she had thought Daddy had left them behind back at their house. As she thought about the day when they had left, she had a really bad homesickness. She wanted to see the other kids again—even Ophelia Weiner, who wasn't always stuck up. And sleep in her own room again, with her Zoomer Zizz poster and her dolls and animals.
She took the sunglasses back to the couch and put them on, just looking at the black for a moment, because it was more interesting than anything else in the stupid, sad hotel. Then she touched them to turn them on, and although the sunglasses stayed black, Mister Sellars' voice was in her ear.
At first she thought it was one of his old messages. But it wasn't.
"If this is you, little Christabel, tell me our code word. Do you remember?"
She had to think for a moment. "Rumplestiltskin," she whispered.
"Good. I want to tell you something. . . ."
"Where are you? Are you okay? Did you wake up?" She was already halfway across the room, heading for the connecting door to go see him, but when the questions had stopped jumping out of her mouth he was still talking. He hadn't even heard her.
". . . And I can't really explain it to you, but I'm very, very busy. I know it looks like I'm sick, but I'm not—I just can't be in my body right now. I hope you're not too worried."
"Are you going to get better?" she asked, but he had started talking again and she finally understood that it was only a recording, that he hadn't called her up to tell her he was awake. He hadn't even called her. It was just a message.
"I need you to listen very carefully, little Christabel. I don't want you to be frightened. I have only a few moments, then I'm going to be very busy again, so I want to leave this for you.
"I suspect Cho-Cho is in just the same situation that I'm in—that he looks like he's sick, or sleeping. Don't worry too much. He's here with me."
She wanted to know where "here" was, but she knew it wouldn't do any good to ask.
"I'm leaving this message for two others reasons," Mister Sellars' voice went on. "One is that no matter what we say, grown-ups can't always make things come out right. I hope I will see you again and talk to you, and that we will be friends for a long time. But if something happens to me—remember, Christabel, I am very old—I want you to remember that I think you are the bravest, kindest little girl I have ever met. And I've been around a long time, so that is not small praise.
"The other thing I want to tell you is that if I manage to . . . to stay well for a little while longer, and some of the other things I'm trying to do also work out, I may need you to help me one more time. I'm not quite sure I understand it myself yet, and I don't really have time to tell you anyway—I'm as busy as the night we burned my house down and I went into the tunnels, do you remember?—but I want you to listen to me now and think about what I'm saying.
"When you first met Cho-Cho, I know he scared you. I think you have come to see that he is not as bad as all that—perhaps you understand that he has had a difficult life and does not trust people, that he is worried that only bad things will happen to him. His life has made him different than you, but there is a lot of good inside him.
"I want you to remember that, little Christabel, because I may need your help. If I do, I will be asking you to . . . to meet someone. That is the only way I can explain it. And that someone may seem even more different and frightening than Cho-Cho. You will have to be as brave as you have ever been, Christabel. And that is very brave indeed. . . ."
CHAPTER 37
The Locked Room
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Suing Do-Gooder Parents for Doing too Much Good
(visual: Wahlstrom heirs entering Stockholm courthouse)
VO: The four children of the late Gunnar and Ki Wahlstrom, famous Swedish environmental activists, are suing their parents' estate, demanding that the Wahlstroms' substantial bequests to environmental organizations be given to them instead.
(visual: Per Wahlstrom)
WAHLSTROM: "Everybody thinks what we are doing is so terrible. But they didn't have to live with parents who paid attention to everything but their own children. Not a one of us cared a fig for whales or rain forests. What about us? Don't we deserve something for putting up with absentee parents for all those years? They cared much more about snails than they did about us."
* * *
Paul ran up to the front of the temple praying that the Wicked Tribe had exaggerated. As he skidded through the door the heat and light hit him like a small explosion and for a moment he could only stand, blinking against the dazzle.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw it first as a homeless shadow—something black sliding swiftly along the desert sands. Even though he had been prepared, warned by the children, it was only when he saw it climb one of the nearby hills in just a few steps, the dust of its seismic footsteps billowing behind it, that he realized how terrifyingly huge it was.
It paused on the hilltop, a colossus come to life. The doglike muzzle lifted as it howled and seconds later the air outside the temple, kilometers away, surged and snapped. Then it lowered its head and began to run once more.
Paul stumbled back through the door on legs that felt like burned matchsticks.
"He's coming! Dread's coming!" He lurched to a halt just inside the inner chamber. Florimel and T4b and the others looked up at him, eyes wide and faces slack from terrors that seemed to have no end. "They're right—he's huge!"
Only Martine had not turned. She was facing the pure white human silhouette that had appeared to them moments earlier and now hung just above the ground like something out of a puppet show. "Tell me," she asked it, "can you talk to Sellars?"
"El Viejo?" The thing squirmed, making its outlines hard to distinguish. "Sometimes. I hear him. But he's all busy right now. Said I was supposed to stay with you."
"Then he gave you a death sentence!" Paul heard something close to utter despair in Florimel's cracked voice. A distant sound like a monstrous drum being pounded—boom, boom, boom—sent faint vibrations through the massive stones of the temple floor.
"Gonna step on us!" T4b shouted.
"Silence, please." Martine turned
away from them to face the great black sarcophagus lying at the center of the chamber. "Stay together," she called. "Someone get the little monkeys."
"What are you doing?" asked Nandi Paradivash, even as he summoned the Wicked Tribe down out of the air with urgent gestures. A few of them settled on Paul, clinging to his clothes and hair.
"Just be quiet. Martine s eyes were closed, her head down. "We have only moments."
The floor was shaking in earnest now, as though bombs were being set off deep beneath the temple. Each titan footfall was louder than the last.
"Hear me!" Martine called out. "Set, Other, whatever your name is—do you remember me? We have met before, I think."
The sarcophagus lay secretive as an unhatched egg. The shuddering made Paul stagger to keep his balance.
"What is this psycho place?" demanded the white silhouette fearfully.
Bonita Mae Simpkins was praying. "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. . . ."
"Listen! I am Martine Desroubins," she said to the low black box. "I taught you the story of the boy in the well. Can you hear me? I am trapped here in this simulation world, and so are many others that you brought into your network. Some of them are children. If you do not help us, we will die." The moment stretched. They could hear the roar of the approaching monster's breath, hissing like a sandstorm. "It will not listen to me," Martine said at last, her voice raw with despair. "I cannot make it listen."
The ground shivered so violently that the whole temple seemed to shift around them. Trickles of rock dust filtered down the walls; Bonnie Mae and T4b were knocked off their feet. Then the footsteps stopped. Even the monstrous sound of breathing was stilled.
Paul licked his lips. It was almost impossible to speak. "Try . . . try again, Martine."
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and put her hands to her head. "Help us, whatever you are—whoever you are. God damn it, I can feel you listening to me! I know you are hurting, but these children will be killed! Help us!"
Something exploded like a bomb above their heads. There was a second concussive crash, then another and another. Flung onto his back, Paul could only stare upward in horror as huge fingers poked through the rocky walls at the top of the great temple. A moment later, with a sustained smash of sound and a rain of falling stones, the entire roof of the cavernous chamber tore free and rose up into the air. A boulder the size of a small car rolled unsteadily past Paul and crashed into the far wall, but he could not even move. Sunlight blazed in, the limitless desert sky now spread above them once more.
The monstrous jackal-headed figure shifted the roof to one side and dropped it. Stone dust boiled up like a mushroom cloud as the giant leaned into the gaping wound that had been the top of the temple room. It smiled, tongue lolling out from jaws that could gulp a Tyrannosaurus like a boiled chicken.
"I'M NOT VERY HAPPY WITH YOU LOT," rumbled Anubis. More stone and dust showered from the crumbling walls. "YOU LEFT BEFORE THE PARTY STARTED—AND THAT'S A BIT RUDE."
Only Martine was standing, still swaying beside the sarcophagus. Paul crawled toward her, intent on pulling her down before the monster reached in and beheaded her like a dandelion puff.
"Help us," he heard her say again. It was little more than a whisper.
"WELL, WELL. WHAT'S THAT WIGGLING ALONG THE FLOOR?" the thing said gleefully.
The sarcophagus began to come apart. Cracks streamed along its angled edges, red light leaking like blood; a moment later the whole thing shifted inside out, as though it contained not the corpse of a god but some new dimension of space-time, unfolding and expanding like a slow-motion detonation until the utter black and the bright, bright glaring red were all Paul could see.
"It's screaming. . . !" he heard Martine cry, her own voice cracked with agony, but she was fading like a dying signal. "The children are. . . ." Paul's head seemed to be filling with fog—chill, empty, dead.
"WHAT IN THE BLOODY HELL. . . ?" was the last thing he heard—a thunderous bellow from above, but already curiously muffled—then even that stone-shattering noise dwindled away as Paul was swallowed by silence and nothingness.
Growling wordlessly, sputtering saliva that fell like rain onto the dusty floor, Dread scrabbled in the debris for long moments, like a child who has discovered nothing in his birthday-present box but tissue paper. They were gone.
The growl rose to a choking snarl of rage. Black spots burst before his eyes like negative stars. He kicked over a temple wall, sent another crashing down with a flailing hand, then bent in the swirling dust and grabbed a stone obelisk. He snapped it loose from its base and hurled it as far as he could. A puff of desert sand marked its distant landing.
When he had smashed the entire temple complex into lumps of crumbling sandstone, he stood in the wreckage. The anger was still there, pressing on the front of his brain until he felt it might catch fire. He threw back his head and howled, but it brought no relief. When the echoes had died in the distant mountains, the desert was silent again, still empty but for himself.
He closed his eyes and screamed, "Anwin!"
It took several seconds before she responded, and through each of those seconds a pulse beat in his skull like a hammerblow. When the window opened, hovering in midair against the desert sky, her eyes were wide with shock and surprise. He didn't know if she was seeing his real self or the mountainous form of Anubis, god of the dead. At that moment, he didn't care.
"What? What is it?" She was sitting in a chair—the angle suggested she was seeing him on her pad instead of the wallscreen. She looked not just startled but guilty and for a fleeting instant his rage cooled enough to wonder why that might be. Then he thought of Martine and her little friends winking out right beneath his fingers and the choking rage fumed up inside him again.
"I'm on the network," he gasped, trying to tame his fury enough to communicate, when what he really wanted to do was tear down the universe and stamp on it. "A connection has just . . . opened up. I need to follow it—go through. It's something to do with the operating system." The operating system itself had defied him—that was the most galling part. When he realized what was happening he had sent a bolt of pain through it that should have frozen every function. He had half-thought he would destroy the thing once and for all, but had been too angry to care. Instead, it had absorbed the punishment and acted anyway. somewhere. It had defied him! And they had defied him, too. They would all pay.
"I'll . . . I'll see what I can do," she stammered. "It may take a little while."
"Now!" he shrieked. "Before it closes completely, or disappears, or whatever. Now!"
Her eyes wide with something more animal than mere guilt, more electric than surprise, she bent to her machinery.
"It's still there," she said. "You're right. But it's just a backdoor in the programming."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"It's a way in and a way out of the network, except it only seems to open inward. I can't explain because I don't really understand." Her terror had been subsumed by concentration, although he could see her fingers trembling above the screen. Even in his white-hot rage he could admire her all-deflecting absorption, her total love for what she did.
Kindred souls, in a way, he thought. But still different enough that my kind of soul has to eat your kind of soul. He would take care of her when he had finished destroying Martine and the others—had the Sulaweyo bitch been with them? He hadn't had time to notice—and after he had reduced every last bit of volition in the operating system into whimpering imbecility.
"I've hooked it up for you as best I can," she said at last. "It's a bit like one of the gateways in other parts of the. . . ."
"Go away now," he said, disconnecting her. He narrowed his focus until he could almost see the dwindling point of transit like a will-o'-the-wisp still floating above the shattered sarcophagus. He could feel his twist strong within him, glowing like a hot wire in his forebrain, roused without his intention, as sometimes happened when he wa
s hunting. Well, I'm hunting now, he thought. Too right I am. They had mocked him, the freaks, and now they thought they were safe. I'm going to find them all, then I'm going to pull them into pieces, until there's nothing left but screaming.
He stepped through, a god with a heart of black fire. A mad god.
Paul could only lie in the dust, struggling to remember where he was, who he was . . . why he was.
It had been like traveling through the center of a dying star. Everything had seemed to collapse into infinite density; for a time he could not measure, he had thought he was dead, nothing but particles of consciousness dispersing in the void, moving farther and farther apart like ships lost from their convoy until communication failed and each became a solitary mote.
He was still not entirely certain that he was alive.
Paul pushed himself up from the ground, which was as dry and dusty as the courtyards of the Temple of Set. There was one huge improvement over Egypt: the sky was gray, spattered with distant stars, the temperature cool. Paul was at the base of a low hill, in the midst of a plain bumpy with other such hills. The landscape seemed strangely familiar.
Bonita Mae Simpkins sat up beside him, rubbing her head. "I'm hurting," she said in a flat voice.
"Me, too. Where are the others? Where are we, for that matter?"
"Inside, I think," said someone else.
Paul turned. Martine was making her way down the steep hillside, half-walking, half-sliding on the loose soil. She was trailed by Nandi, T4b, Florimel, and a boy he didn't recognize—a small, dirty child with raggedly cut black hair. The Wicked Tribe, their color muted in the twilight, circled above them like a swarm of gnats.
"What do you mean?" he asked. "And who's that little boy?"
"This is Cho-Cho," Martine announced. "Sellars' friend. You already met him—he just looked a bit different. We've been having a talk, and now he's going to be traveling with us."
