The Edge of Reason

by Melinda Snodgrass

  Richard considered. Grenier was still free and powerful. He snorted.

  A tingling jolt seemed to go straight up into his brain. The sore tissues of his nose went numb. A few seconds later there was a bitter aftertaste on the back of his tongue, but Richard didn’t mind. He felt great.

  Angela held up the glass. “Lick off the last of it. It’ll help your mouth.” He obeyed and the same numbness pervaded the cut tissues of his mouth and tongue.

  Richard found himself on his feet. “Yeah. Okay. This is good.”

  “Kenntnis, come quickly.” Rhiana’s voice crackled on a bad cell connection. “We’ve found something, but we don’t understand it.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the base of the cliff. We need—It’s trying to get Cross!”

  The phone went dead.

  Kenntnis considered retreat, but Cross was irreplaceable.

  Richard, Angela and Robert reacted to the faint, distant crack and chatter of gunfire.

  “The cavalry,” Robert said.

  Richard couldn’t help it; he glanced over at Angela. She understood the unspoken question. “With Weber leading the charge,” she said, and grinned.

  They listened to the increasing tempo of gunfire. “And meeting some opposition from the sound of it,” the judge said, frowning. “Idiots. Who resists the FBI?”

  “Desperate or really confident people. Either way, we should get the hell out of here,” Angela said.

  “You go ahead,” Richard said. “I need to find Grenier and use the sword on him.” Angela put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “It’s going to be a lot harder later,” Richard warned.

  Seeing the sense in what he had said, Angela nodded and turned to gather up her medical bag. Richard saw her eyes widen in horror.

  “Richard!” She grabbed him and spun him around.

  Now he could see what had so frightened her. Grenier stood in the door of the study. A fountain of light cascaded off the folded reading glasses that he held in his right hand.

  The light splashed across Angela’s booted feet. The intricate leaves and vines on the thick oriental carpet writhed and shot up out of the nap, twisting themselves around her body.

  Robert cried out in shock and alarm as the vines wrapped tightly around Angela’s neck, forced themselves up her nose and down her throat. Guttural noises erupted from Angela. If she hadn’t moved him, it would have been Richard choking instead.

  The entire rug was seething now. The judge, with admirable presence of mind, jumped up onto the desk, but it was only a momentary respite. The vines pursued.

  The vines thrust into every orifice of Willie’s body, and seemed to find nourishment in the dead flesh. They grew even more quickly there.

  Richard leaped away from Angela’s clawing hands. Her eyes showed mute desperation. He nearly fell as the vines tangled around his feet.

  Richard drew the sword. The overtones climbed beyond human hearing, then began again with a bass groan and a rapidly ascending scale. He swept the star-swirling blade across the vines at his feet. They screamed and liquefied into a foul-smelling black ooze.

  Angela lay on the heaving, writhing rug. Her body was almost invisible beneath the leaves and vines.

  “All of you die!” Richard yelled as he thrust the point of the sword deep into the rug where the spell had first landed. They did.

  He heard his father’s careful precise voice, now carrying an uncontrollable quaver. “ … Hallowed be thy Name. Thy Kingdom come—”

  “Shut up, sir! Don’t call them. There are openings everywhere.” Richard thrust the sword at one of the opaque mirrors.

  Richard turned, and he and Grenier measured each other across half a room and an intellectual divide a universe wide.

  “There’s so much magic flowing we could drown in it,” Grenier said. “And I can throw spells until whatever you took wears off. And of course you have to protect them.” He jerked his head toward Angela, lying very still on the rug, and Robert perched on the desk. “That’s the problem with being a hero.”

  Richard glanced over toward the abandoned shotgun. Grenier caught the look, and fire arced, struck the metal and the barrel melted. Richard cringed, waiting for the shells to explode, but amazingly they didn’t. Grenier laughed and advanced a few steps into the study. They circled each other warily.

  “Papa, take Angela. Leave by the window,” Richard called.

  Fire flared in the lenses of the glasses. The windows vanished as the walls grew closed, obliterating doorway and windows. The stench from the dead vines made Richard’s gut heave. Grenier flexed his hands, grinning wildly.

  It’s like he’s drunk, Richard thought. What is going on? It’s supposed to take enormous power to do this much magic, and he’s unfazed.

  But there was no more time to ponder the problem. The lenses of the glasses were pulsing with changing colors. Richard decided to try to parry the attack rather than attacking the result of the spell. He dropped his weight, knees bent, balance evenly divided between his feet. He had fenced epee in college. The sword was more like a rapier and heavier. Richard hoped the high from the cocaine would last long enough.

  Grenier’s hand shot out, releasing a spell. Richard lunged and parried high left. The fire vanished into the blade, but it didn’t blow back onto Grenier the way it had with Delay in the church, perhaps because this was no young apprentice but a master of sorcery, or perhaps because there was so much magic present, as Grenier had said.

  Richard rushed Grenier, a swift advance ending in a long, deep groin-pulling lunge. Grenier grabbed a book off a small table and slapped the point of the sword aside. Richard pushed back onto his back leg. Grenier threw the book into his face. Richard knocked it aside with his right hand. Fire flew. Toward the judge this time. Richard parried.

  Richard weighed the options. An all-out attack on Grenier, and hope he could neutralize him before the sorcerer landed a spell on Angela or his father? Or fight defensively, and try to protect them? Richard tried to reach a wall to neutralize the magic that closed the cage. If the judge and Angela were free Richard could concentrate on Grenier. The minister sensed his intent, and pushed hard, keeping Richard from ever reaching the blank walls.

  They circled each other, exchanging feints, waiting for the other to attack. The attacks came in a flurry of fire and night. Golden light arced and soared across the room, and was eaten by the darkness of the sword. Once Richard missed and the spell reached the glass-fronted bookcases. Glass wasps swarmed out with an eerie chiming buzz, and headed for his father. Running full-out, Richard managed to bring the sword through them in an overhand cut. He couldn’t control his momentum and slammed into the desk.

  Robert grabbed Richard’s shoulders, helped steady him and got him turned around. His father’s lips were against his ear.

  “Try to maneuver him over here,” the judge whispered.

  Richard gave an almost imperceptible nod and, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, advanced on Grenier.

  Kenntnis entered the dell. The chimes stirred and echoed in one perfect chord, but his effect ended with the bells. The glass sculptures were stained red in the light of the setting sun. In the distance he could hear the real-world sounds of a very real firefight going on by the gate. Kenntnis realized he didn’t recognize any of the artists in the garden, and a cold hollow formed at his core.

  Rhiana stood on a small knoll in the center of the sculpture garden. Pennies spun at her feet, creating the illusion she stood in the midst of a fire. Her right hand was outstretched. Balanced on her palm was a tiny speck of darkness.

  Kenntnis recognized the creature who sat on one of the smaller sculptures watching.

  Oh, Richard, now would be a good time for “in the nick of time.”

  Rhiana flung the darkness into the air, crying out the spell. Kenntnis felt a cold more profound than any he’d experienced in the vast emptiness between the galaxies. He sensed the bosonic atoms falling into the lowest possible
quantum state. It was a stunning blending of physics and magic, and he was powerless, trapped between the two forces. The matter that shaped his human body blasted into pieces. Icy claws settled into him, holding him like a butterfly on a pin. The spinning darkness released by Rhiana fell over his glittering form and swept him up in the whirlwind. Time slowed. The world became a smear and a blur as human time raced forward … and … he … froze … .

  Parts of his beaten body were starting to make their presence known. Richard could feel sweat stinging in the cuts on his face and mouth. His abused testicles hated it every time he lunged, and his quads popped each time he pushed back out of the lunge. His breath was loud in his own ears.

  Suddenly Grenier’s reading glasses began to blaze constantly. It distracted even their owner. Grenier stared down at them.

  “She did it,” Grenier said in a fierce whisper.

  That can’t be good, thought Richard, and used Grenier’s momentary inattention to rush him.

  Richard came in slightly to the left. It forced Grenier to half-turn and step closer to the fallen chair, the desk and Willie’s body.

  The swirl of stars around the sword broadened and widened until Richard was looking through a hazy shield of stars at his foe. Out of the corner of his eye, Richard saw his father move. Hunching, Robert circled around the end of the desk, reached down and grabbed. The judge came up holding the frayed ends of an electrical wire.

  Richard flung himself forward in a wild attack to keep Grenier focusing on him. Robert rushed forward, and pressed the exposed wires onto the back of Grenier’s neck. The man screamed, his back arching.

  Richard’s parry caught the spell on the edge of his blade. He swept the sword back, spinning on his back foot as he did so, and brought the blade across Grenier’s exposed right wrist. The hand dropped onto the sticky floor. The glasses went dark. Blood fountained from the severed stump. Grenier fell onto the floor and went into a violent seizure.

  “Get a tourniquet on him,” Richard ordered.

  “Let him bleed. Demon,” spat the judge.

  “No. I want him alive, in jail, and robbed of his power.”

  Robert’s normal icy control reasserted itself. He nodded, pulled off his necktie, put a knee in Grenier’s chest to control him, and tied off the gushing arm.

  Richard touched the wall. The windows returned.

  He broke out several mullions with the hilt of the sword and briefly breathed in the cold, pine-scented air, then he whirled, ran to Angela, and gathered her into his arms.

  “Oh, Angie, sweetie.” He felt beneath her jaw for a pulse. “Be all right. Be all right.” He found it, but it was faint and jumping.

  Richard pulled Angela’s cell phone out of her pocket. He hit the call list and as expected, found Weber. He dialed.

  “Yeah?!” came the sharp, beloved voice.

  “Where are you?”

  “Coming to rescue you, Rhode Island. You are the biggest ass—”

  “Damon, we need a medic and quick. It’s Angela. And Grenier could use help too.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Cut off his hand.”

  “Great, how do I explain that to the FBI? Hang tough. We’ll be there soon.”

  The connection was broken. Richard sat holding Angela. Exhaustion edged forward like the incoming tide. He felt Robert’s hand on his shoulder.

  Richard looked up. “Papa, thank you. You saved us.”

  “No, I helped.”

  They fell silent.

  “It’s yes,” Robert said.

  Richard shook himself out of his haze. “What?”

  “The answer to your question. It’s yes.”

  Embarrassed, the judge walked away. He skirted Willie’s half-decayed corpse, perforated with holes so both bone and viscera showed. Richard wondered how he would explain that to the feds. His father bent down briefly then went to the window to watch for the FBI.

  Richard held Angela and softly rocked her. He wondered where Kenntnis was. It was so unlike him not to be here. His father’s voice broke though his reverie.

  “Richard, I think you better come look at this, and tell me what it means.”

  Richard felt like a brute for leaving her, but Weber and rescue were coming, and this couldn’t wait. What Robert had seen through the window were bands of light thrusting into the sky off to their left along the cliff face. Where the light touched the rock it looked plastic and it seemed to be breathing.

  Richard carried the drawn sword. Ahead of them was a crooked shoji gate. For some reason it felt disturbing.

  “Let’s not walk under that,” Richard said.

  He and Robert left the gravel path and walked in the snow. They passed close to a tree on whose bare branches hung a number of steel, glass and ceramic wind chimes. They had all been fused into undifferentiated lumps.

  Glass sculptures glowed dark orange, red, purple, sick green, and threw their light into the night sky. The temperature was dropping, frosting the top of the snow with ice crystals that crunched beneath the soles of their shoes. There was a strange metallic smell in the air.

  In the midst of the colored glass forms, a clear glass piece wove a serpentine shape across the snow. It was reminiscent of the sand eddies left in ancient sea beds by long dry waves. It stood about six feet tall and ten feet long.

  At the heart of the clear glass there was a core of spinning darkness. Orbiting the darkness was a glitter of silver bright lights dancing through a swirling golden mist. It looked like someone had trapped a dust devil comprised of diamonds and gold dust. Tendrils of light were being dragged into the darkness.

  Richard walked around the clear glass piece and retreated with a yelp of pain. He had never felt such profound cold. He looked down at the patch of frostbite across the back of his hand.

  Next he approached the pulsing cliff. Picture it closed. But it was an enormous rip in reality, much larger than anything he’d faced before. He struggled, but the tear continued to solidify, the opening widening. Pillars began to form on the sides, and there was the suggestion of an arch in the rough stone of the cliff face. Realizing this was a gate, Richard retreated, exhausted.

  A hand fell on his shoulder. “Richard,” came his father’s voice, and it held that uncertain quaver he had heard in Grenier’s office.

  Richard turned to find Rhiana regarding him from in front of a dark purple sculpture. She was dressed in a form-hugging dress that seemed constructed of snowflakes and spiderweb. Diamond pins glittered in her long hair, which floated up behind her and coiled around her arms and neck in defiance of the slight breeze.

  “You can’t close it. Not with Kenntnis gone.”

  “Rhiana, what have you done?” Richard asked, struggling for calm.

  “I chose.”

  Richard held out a hand toward Rhiana. “And I choose you. Cross wanted to destroy you. I told Kenntnis I would never allow that.”

  “So, choose me now. I’ll protect you.” She held out her hand to him.

  A black and purple shadow boiled out of the monolith. Robert gasped and his grip on Richard’s shoulder tightened. The colors transformed into a sharp-faced man. He came up behind Rhiana, laid a hand on her shoulder, and smiled at Richard; an expression both triumphant and mocking.

  “You’re human, Rhiana, at least part. Don’t do this,” Richard pleaded.

  She laid her hand over the man’s. “And this part is better. I belong someplace, Richard.”

  “You belong to both. Why reject us?”

  “Because they appreciate me. I’ve done something none of them could ever do. I blended magic and physics. You just wanted to use me, use my power to ultimately destroy my power. Why would I do that?”

  “Because they’re—”

  “Evil?” Rhiana supplied. “People throw that word around too easily. And besides, we don’t see it that way. Everyone’s a hero in their own little personal drama. Don’t be a dead hero, Richard. Come with me. I’ll protect you,” she said aga
in. Richard shook his head. “You can’t stand against us, not with Kenntnis trapped. He’s ours. Your world is ours.” She gestured at the clear glass sculpture.

  Richard stared in shock at the gold and diamond swirl in the glass. Tried to square that with the huge man who had dominated his life for the past months. He crept toward the glass, but had to retreat from the unrelenting cold. Nothing human could survive it.

  “You can’t get close enough to use the sword. Absolute zero gives you slow glass. Slow glass traps light. That’s all Kenntnis is … was,” Rhiana said.

  “Hush!” the man said. “You give them too much.” Power flowed out of his hand and into Rhiana’s shoulder. They began to dissolve into pulsing colors, black and purple, and vanished back through the purple glass sculpture.

  “Richard!”

  It was Weber followed by two big men. One was white, the other African-American. They all wore body armor. The two men had FBI jackets over their flak jackets. They were all running through the shoji gate.

  “Damon, don’t!” Richard yelled.

  Weber and the African-American agent made it through safely, but something black and glistening, as if it had been dipped in oil, came undulating out of the crosspiece of the gate, and seized the other agent.

  He was pulled, kicking and screaming into the air. Weber and the other FBI agent whirled, and shot. Intead of the usual roar, the gun fire was a faint pop, and then their guns wouldn’t fire. The touch of dark magic damped the ability of gunpowder to ignite. The captured agent’s screams echoed around the dell.

  Richard charged, and barreled between Weber and the African-American agent, knocking them off balance. He was beneath the shoji gate. There didn’t seem to be enough air, and what was there was tainted with a harsh metallic smell that was almost a taste. Richard knew he stood between worlds, and he had very little time. Swinging the sword up, he managed to touch the Old One. A keening, howling wail began. The agent fell heavily to the ground.