Then, hovering near the west end between the 2,270th and 2,280th floors, Pauline spotted a matte black armchair balloon. She accelerated the trusty jelsair and headed straight for it.
Pauline looked up and noticed all at once that somehow the ceiling of Middlespace had become … blurry. She rubbed her eyes, shook her head, and looked again. No, not blurry; there was simply a mist of some kind forming up there. A white mist that roiled and eddied and bulged. In a span of mere seconds, the mist congealed into clouds. They expanded until they became a bank of grayish-white cumuli blocking out the ceiling. Pauline was getting closer to the balloon.
Then the clouds grew darker. A half-mile-long bolt of greenish-blue lightning zigzagged through Middlespace, striking something far below Pauline and exploding in a fiery orange bloom, the sound of which reached her ears at the same instant that she heard the sharp-edged clangor of the lightning strike’s attendant thunder. Pauline looked around her. Jelsairs and balloons and flying toys were all beginning to migrate toward the balconies to get out of the coming storm, but the balloon she was heading toward stayed put. And the fearless Flok’embles, who seemed to relish the weather, sailed about as always.
A great wind gusted, blowing Pauline off course. She adjusted just as raindrops started to fall. She was only a hundred yards away from the balloon. Then eighty. The rain was falling in sheets now, pitchforks of lightning stabbing the air all around her. Now fifty yards. It was when she was only thirty yards away from the balloon that she realized it was not occupied by a Wreau or a Thropinese, but by a ghoul. No—correction, a human with ghoulish makeup streaming down his face. His head lolled to one side. He held a radio in one hand, and his other was tightly closed around something. Pauline was pretty sure what that something was.
Pauline put the top down, exposing herself to the storm. She hovered twenty feet directly below Dave Green in case he dropped the vial, though if he did, she thought the wind would probably whisk it out of her reach. She couldn’t stay here, she knew. She had to alert Chance and Braig and, ultimately, Yryssy Ayopy to Dave Green’s whereabouts. Yryssy would certainly need to come to him because he appeared too sick to even get himself out of the storm. She hoped feverishly that Braig’s plan, whatever it was, had worked.
Pauline was soaked. Water was accumulating on the floor of the jelsair. But she couldn’t put the top up, because that would destroy any chance at all of her catching the vial should the “ghoul” above her drop it.
Then Pauline remembered something.
She picked up the jelsair phone and dialed zero.
“Directory assistance.”
“Uh, would you connect me to—”
“Not you again.”
“I know, sorry, would you connect me to Rod Nthn, a Thropinese? He’s on the 5,999th floor.”
“Please hold.”
Pauline prayed he wasn’t still manacled to his throne.
“Hello?”
“Rod?” shouted Pauline over the din of the storm. “It’s me, your betrothed.”
“Pauline, my dear, how I love you so. Where are you?”
“I need you to do something for me. To prove your undying love.”
“Anything.”
“I remember you said you could get on the PA and make announcements anytime you wanted to.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to announce something. Get a pencil and paper.”
“Okay, ready.”
“Announce this: ‘Mr. Green, Middlespace, black balloon, west end of 2,277, Emergency.’ Do it now, and repeat it once in five minutes.”
“When will you be home, my sweet?”
“I’ll be on my way the minute you’ve made the announcements. You’re sure everyone in the infirmary will hear it?”
“Everyone.”
Pauline hung up. There were eleven minutes left. Then ten. Then nine. The storm still raged. Why was Rod taking so long?
The PA crackled on. Though she recognized the voice as Rod Nthn’s, she couldn’t make out a word due to the incessant storm. Good; neither would Dave Green. Then Rod repeated the announcement. Good ol’ Rod. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.
Three minutes. Pauline scanned the west-end balconies, looking for Chance or Braig. She glanced up at Dave Green, whose one closed fist hung over the armrest, twenty feet above. He seemed delirious and didn’t appear to notice the vampiress-driven craft hovering beneath him.
The jelsair abruptly began to move on its own. Pauline glanced at the clock. Her time had just run out. And there were no more clahd. The craft automatically delivered her to the nearest dock, a rickety wooden contrivance at the west end of Middlespace. When she arrived, she looked back at Dave Green in the distance, about two hundred yards away. As she docked, she noticed something far down the balcony.
Peeking out of the doorway to a stairwell in the middle distance was a slight fellow with a bandage on his head and bright blue ears some might say stuck out just a little bit too far.
CHAPTER 29
Chance was jogging up and down the halls of the 2,250th floor, looking for Braig, when a voice like a honking cat came on the PA system and announced that a certain Mr. Green was at the west end of Middlespace, whatever that was, around floor 2,277.
“They found him,” Chance said to himself, turning down a long hallway on the 2,250th floor, now looking for someone, anyone, that he could ask where Middlespace was and how to get to the 2,277th floor. But there was no one to ask. Wait, what’s that in the distance?
He could make out four figures way down the hall: two Balliopes; a vast, scaly beast dressed in a dirty white apron with a blue-and-yellow horn emerging from its forehead; and a struggling Wreau trapped in a tall, narrow cage on wheels being dragged down the hallway toward Chance. He started to run toward it. Just as he got close enough to recognize Braig in the cage, the vast creature of uncertain make, who was apparently in charge, said to the Balliopes:
“Present … arms!”
And the Balliopes lowered their halberds to prevent Chance from approaching farther.
“Braig,” shouted Chance. “What happened?”
“I got arrested for—”
“No speaking to the prisoner, Euvyd,” said the vast creature, who appeared to be covered in scales that looked like the black keys on a piano. Each massive, muscular arm terminated in a hand consisting of two clawlike phalanges.
“Shut up, M’Quiminy,” said Braig, who then turned to Chance. “Mr. Bee, they got me for kidnapping Mrs. Rurriery.”
“You let him go,” Chance shouted at M’Quiminy, but the chief of surgery ignored him, instead ordering the Balliopes to proceed down the hall, go left, and stop at elevator bank 1,004.
“Braig,” said Chance, “are you going to the basement?”
“No, thank Saint Philomene,” said Braig. “A special holding cell on the sixteenth floor.”
“Perhaps you’d like to join him, Euvyd?” said M’Quiminy, smiling grotesquely, revealing sharp brown teeth that reminded Chance of broken oars. “No? Then shut your pink Euvyd mouth and scurry away to your ice-eared brethren.”
“Chance,” said Braig. “What about our patient?”
“She’s awake. On her way. Braig, how do I get to Middlespace, floor 2,277?”
“I heard the PA announcement, too. Go back the way you came, take elevator bank 814 to 2,270, get off, turn left, go to the very end of the hall, take seven flights of stairs, and open the black door. Prepare to be shocked by what you see.”
“Silence!” shouted M’Quiminy.
But Chance was already running back the way he had come.
When he finally reached the black door, he paused for a moment, then put one blue ear to the sturdy steel of the door. It sounded like there was a TV set on the other side, tuned to a show featuring a thunderstorm. Knowing Saint Philomene’s, Chance figured there was probably more to it than that. He opened the door.
It wasn’t a TV. Chance had never seen—never imagined—an i
ndoor space with the dimensions of what was now before him. And he had certainly never imagined an indoor electrical storm. Drops of rain peppered his face. A majestic bolt of lightning struck a balcony directly across from him, on the other side of Middlespace, followed by a roll of thunder less than two seconds after. Knowing that sound travels a little more than a mile in five seconds, he estimated the distance between himself and the opposite side to be about a third of a mile. He ducked back inside the door.
He had not traveled to a gargantuan supernatural hospital to get struck by underground lightning. He closed his eyes, hoping for guidance from his father, but his father remained silent. It didn’t matter; Chance knew that he might be needed, so he had to go out there.
Or maybe not. It was all out of his hands at this point, wasn’t it? Bittius was in charge of getting Yryssy Ayopy to Dave Green. It was now just a matter of finding his sister and getting the heck out of there.
Chance did not want to go out in that storm, to put it mildly. But he did take another peek. As he squinted against the buckshot rain smiting his face, he heard, above the roar of the storm, a familiar voice.
“Chance!” it shouted from somewhere. “I need you, now!”
He peeked around the door. There was Pauline, way down the balcony, soaked, waving her arms and jumping up and down next to a wooden dock of some kind, next to which were a couple of teacup-shaped craft bobbing in the air.
“Come here!” she shouted. “Help!”
A bolt struck the lightning rod at the acme of a large red-and-white balloon moored to a balcony a hundred stories below. Chance was about to duck back behind the door, but he could no longer ignore the sound of his sister crying for help. He stepped out onto the balcony and ran as fast as he could toward Pauline, the hair on his neck standing up like iron filings under a magnet.
“Chance,” said Pauline when her brother arrived, already on his way to soaking wet. “Have you got any clahd?”
“Huh?”
She pointed to Dave Green and his balloon. “I have to go out there. In a jelsair. I need to hover under him, in case he drops the vial. And we need Donbaloh money to do it. I’m out.”
“But Yryssy’s on her way. Bittius is bringing her. Look, there they are now.”
At another dock about a hundred yards down the balcony, Yryssy and Bittius were climbing into a jelsair, preparing to fly out to Dave Green, while a jelsair rental agent was gesturing in the negative at them, trying to persuade them that during a violent electrical storm was not the best time to go for a jaunt.
“Those things fly?” said Chance.
“Yep. Dave Green is close to death. He may drop the vial accidentally, or even break his word and drop it after he’s cured.”
“I don’t have any clahd,” said Chance. “Besides, you can’t fly out there in this.”
Then Pauline remembered. The mirror-shiny silver ten-clahd piece in her back pocket. It would buy her two precious minutes of flying time. She jumped into a jelsair as a bolt of lightning struck a balcony just a few floors directly above them. Pauline was about to drop the coin in the slot when Chance said, “Wait.”
He took a deep breath, innnn … ouuut, then ran out onto the dock and jumped into the jelsair with his sister, certain that a sizzling electrocution awaited them both.
Pauline streaked out to the balloon, stopping to hover beneath it just as Yryssy and Bittius arrived, their jelsair’s wing just a few inches from Dave Green’s right elbow.
“Sir!” shouted Bittius, as Yryssy unsteadily climbed onto the wing of the jelsair to get close to the man. “Mr. Green!”
Dave Green, all slumped in his armchair, moved his head the tiniest bit. He was not holding the vial so tightly now, and Pauline could see its lid peeking out from between his thumb and forefinger. Pauline hovered twenty feet directly beneath it. The falling rain felt like acid in her and her brother’s eyes, the wind shouldered against them like linebackers, the lightning branched in irregular patterns all around them, and Yryssy Ayopy, anchored by a rope and balanced at the edge of the jelsair reached out and grabbed one of Dave Green’s hands, the other, still holding the vial, too far to reach. Yryssy jammed a syringe filled with Ypocrasyne into the meat of his palm and quickly but cautiously withdrew to the cockpit to join Bittius.
Dave lifted his head up and opened his eyes. He looked around, still in a daze. With one hand he reached up to rub his eyes. The other hand, hanging over the armrest, opened like the great jaws of the infirmary mail-room iron claw, but instead of mail, it dropped a glass vial the size of a AA battery. It began to tumble in free fall, almost as if in slow motion, and Chance jumped out of the jelsair cockpit onto the wing and rapidly crawled to the edge. He reached out as far as he could, but the vial, caught by the wind, slipped by him less than an inch from his outstretched fingers and Chance slipped off the wing, barely grabbing the edge at the last instant. As he looked down at the wavering path of the vial, buffeted by the winds as it fell, the jelsair, of its own accord, began to slowly fly back toward the dock. Time had run out. He held on tight, the blood throbbing in his head, almost drowning out the screams of Pauline, who was trying to climb out onto the wing to save her brother, but the jelsair tilted alarmingly, forcing her back into the cockpit.
The vial was almost out of sight when it hit the top of a large celadon balloon, bounced high into the air, and was swallowed by a passing Flok’emble, who began to fly in large, lazy figure eights. Then it flew up, up, up in a tight helix until it was nearly level with Pauline and Chance, abruptly changed course, and headed in a path that would take it under their jelsair.
Chance shouted, “Meet me in the dressing room!” at his sister, and when the time was right, he let go of the edge of the jelsair’s wing, falling through space until he landed on the back of the strange bird, Western style, and grabbed its long ears to keep from falling off. The Flok’emble was not happy about this and began flying like a stunt plane through the dwindling storm, twisting, turning, diving, upside-downing, even rising up to the undercarriages of balloon baskets and jelsairs to try to scrape Chance off, but Chance hung on tight and the beast began to lose steam, now soaring instead of flying, dropping floor by floor, until the exhausted creature landed on the railing of a balcony some two hundred floors up, spectators running after them, some shouting, some clapping, others uttering appreciative sounds, and still others, whom he recognized as Balliopes, yelling, “Arrest him!”
The Flok’emble jumped down to the balcony floor, Chance holding on to the animal for dear life.
“Euvyd, it’s illegal to fly Flok’embles,” said the first Balliope to approach. “Let go of it and come with us. You are about to spend a night in jail.”
“I order you to quarantine this animal,” said Chance, with as much authority and force as he could muster. But the Balliopes, six of whom had now congregated, just laughed.
“Laugh away, Balliopes!” shouted Chance. “But I will make sure Sir Amk Bittius the Fourth knows it was you who disobeyed his direct order to put this creature in sealed medical quarantine. And you know what Bittius’s rage is like. So I’m not letting go until you have this Flok’emble, who is a danger to every living thing in the infirmary, tethered and brought, personally, by you, to the nearest quarantine. Understood?”
Chance had never spoken with such conviction in his life, and it must have worked, because the Balliopes muttered, “Understood” and led the animal away. They had forgotten to arrest Chance. The latest in a series of strokes of good fortune.
Chance was about to follow the Balliopes to make sure they did as he had ordered, but he was accosted by, of all things, a Euvyd, who blocked his path.
“Hey, buddy!” said the Euvyd, jumping up and down in excitement, keeping Chance from getting past. “That was amazing! I wish I had the nerve to do that. How did it feel? The wind in your hair and all? Looking down at certain death? Hey, what happened to you?”
The Euvyd poked at the soaked bandage on Chance’s head. He
had forgotten about it.
“Um, ow,” said Chance. “Uh, I fell. Off of a, um, a Vyrndeet.”
“Hey, what’s up with your ears? They don’t look right. This one looks like it’s turning pink. Are you okay? Do you want an aspirin?”
“No, thanks,” said Chance, backing up, realizing with horror that some of the blue makeup must have washed off in the rain. The Euvyd reached out and pinched Chance’s ear.
“Ow!”
“Sorry, sorry.” The Euvyd looked down at his thumb and forefinger. They were blue. “Wait a minute. You’re not a Euvyd, you’re a—”
Chance took off, trying every doorknob as he passed. The Euvyd ran after him, shouting, “Police! Police!”
A few of the ever-present Balliopes, aroused by the summons, picked up their halberds and began running in his direction. Two others materialized behind Chance. There was one more door to try before they caught him.
Locked. The lucky streak was over.
They were upon him. A lead-weighted net flew toward him.
Chance glanced over the edge of the balcony. Some ten floors directly below him, a purple-and-yellow-checkered balloon floated peacefully in the fresh, rain-washed air.
Chance climbed onto the balcony railing, took a deep yogic breath, and jumped as far into space as he could.
He landed just off-center on top of the soft balloon, bounced off at an angle and somersaulted in midair, heading right for a balcony, which he slapped into face-first, hard enough to loosen his teeth, but not so hard he couldn’t get a grip on the railing. As halberds and nets fell past him from above, he climbed up and over, not a soul in sight. He tried the first door he came across, which opened onto a vacant stairwell on the 2,602nd floor.
Chance was glad he had memorized the name of Arbipift Obriirpt, M’Quiminy’s personal bodyguard, who, as Chance had learned from the two Vyrndeets while he was hiding under the counter in the nurse’s station so long before, might have the only map that showed humans how to get out of this place. But how to find Arbipift?
He needed a phone.
Saint Philomene's Infirmary for Magical Creatures Page 13
