by Darren Shan
I rock back and forth, moaning, glancing around, seeing demons in the throes of celebration, corpses of soldiers and Disciples being passed around like canapés at a party. Their howls, grunts and chattering start to sound like music to my ears or the chanting of a long, complicated spell. Then I realise—the sound isn’t of demonic origin. It’s coming from somewhere else… from the rocks beneath me.
I look down, expecting some new torment of Lord Loss’s. Instead I find the face of the girl— Bec—bulging out of the rock, eyes open, lips moving swiftly. Beranabus sees it too. His fingers go limp on my shoulder as he stares at the face, lost for words, forgetting all about the demons and our foolish quest.
“What’s this?” Lord Loss frowns. “Little Bec, present and alert after all these centuries? Impossible. How can her soul have…” He smiles. “No matter. She is powerful, Beranabus, even more than you or Grubitsch. But she cannot save you. Trapped in the rocks, she can only mourn your sad passing.”
The girl speaks quicker than ever, her lips a blur. I feel the magic inside me pulse in time with her chanting. I can’t understand her, but the magic does and it swirls around inside me, excited, trying to reach out to her. Since I’ve nothing to lose, I let it have its way. I step back mentally and let the magic and the girl communicate freely. As the pair link in some unknowable way, I feel my own lips moving, the girl’s words becoming mine, like when I was relaying her previous outburst to Beranabus in his cave.
“Come now,” Lord Loss says, descending gracefully, signalling to the demons around us. “Enough of this childishness. Surrender, Grubitsch, and I will go easy on you. Well… easier than I planned to.”
“We’ll never surrender!” Beranabus roars, coming alive again, releasing me and Kernel, bringing up his hands to engage the demon master in battle.
“Take him,” Lord Loss says, yawning mockingly. The nearest demons howl and hurl themselves at the magician—then strike against an invisible boundary and bounce back off it.
“Impressive,” Lord Loss murmurs. “But how long do you think you can sustain such a barrier, old man?”
“This isn’t my work,” Beranabus says, staring at me uncertainly. The girl’s hands have formed now and stick stiffly out of the ground, grey and rocky. I take them, my fingers large and chunky in comparison to hers. We continue to babble, her, me and the magic.
Kernel screams as maggots chew their way deeper into his brain. He jerks aside wildly and the demons eagerly grab for him, but he rebounds against the barrier and is hurled to the ground, landing by my knees. Beranabus stoops and puts his fingers to the boy’s forehead. Magic flares. Maggots fall out of Kernel’s bleeding sockets and shrivel, dead before they hit the ground. Kernel moans and slumps unconscious.
Beranabus faces me, features alive with hope. “Let’s go!” He grasps my elbow. “If you can maintain this barrier, they can’t stop us getting into the cave. We—”
My head whips towards him and the girl barks something, using my lips. I don’t know what she says, but it brings a groan of desperation from Beranabus. “No! You can’t tell me that. Not now. Not after all this. Not when we’re so close.”
I’ve no time to ponder his words. My eyes refocus on the girl’s and lock on her peculiar stony pupils. We’re speaking faster, louder, a fierce magical energy building around us, causing all the hairs on my body to stand up, then burn down to their roots. My clothes also burn away. So do Beranabus’s and Kernel’s. Within seconds we’re naked and hairless, and still the energy builds.
Lord Loss senses danger. “Get them!” he bellows. “Destroy that barrier! Kill them all!”
The demons scurry to obey, but their efforts are wasted. The barrier repels them casually. The harder they throw themselves against it, the harder they rebound. Bolts of magic are returned with interest, tearing apart those who fired them. They try to claw it to pieces, rip it apart with their teeth, burrow underneath to attack from within the earth, all to no avail.
The energy is unbearable. It goes beyond all my notions of normal heat. I think this is what it would be like to hover within the heart of the sun. The rock is melting around the girl’s face, but she remains, more of her form becoming visible as the stone recedes.
Screams of panic. With an effort I raise my head. The demons are staring at the sky, horrified and bewildered.
Looking up, I see something incomprehensible. The sky is pulsing. It’s like looking at the underside of a trampoline while somebody leaps up and down on top. In the centre, a funnel has formed, as if the universe is being pulled towards one point. As I watch, it throbs low, then pulls up high… low/high… low/high. And it might be my imagination, but it seems as if the tip of the funnel hangs directly over me, Kernel, Beranabus and the ghost girl, Bec.
Lights flicker across the distorted sky. Clouds burst into flame. The tip of the funnel pushes lower and lower, ever closer to us. The demons scatter, screeching and keening. Stuff like this happens every day in their own universe. They aren’t bothered by magical madness there. But they didn’t expect it in this universe of order and sanity. They don’t know what it means or how to respond.
“This will not save you!” Lord Loss shouts none too convincingly. “Stay, you scum!” he roars at the fleeing demons. “Fight! We can break through this barrier and kill them. You must not…”
I tune him out. My lips are my own again during a brief pause in the spell. “What’s happening?” I wheeze, directing the question at Beranabus. But he can only shake his head and stare at Bec and me. Then the spell starts again and I can’t ask any more questions. My lips are Bec’s. My magic and her magic—one. Our minds join. I get flashes of her life—a simple farming society, demons, a quest, warriors, a magician, closing the tunnel between worlds, sacrificing herself, trapped in a cave, her spirit somehow separating from her body, dying but not moving on, imprisoned, no way out, haunting the centuries, unable to escape the rocky confines of the cave.
Then I’m inside somebody else’s head. I see a small, modern village, thousands of patches of light in the sky around me, a baby that looks oddly familiar, a young punk who… no, surely that’s not Dervish! Yes, it is, a young and spiky-haired Dervish Grady, fighting alongside Shark, Sharmila, Beranabus, a dark-skinned man and…
Kernel sits up and groans. He shakes his head groggily. His empty sockets turn left and right as if he’s looking for something. They fix sightlessly on Bec and me. Trembling, moaning with pain, he reaches over and lays his hands on top of mine. My magic shoots out to him, then blasts back stronger than ever, drawing power from the blind teenager. His lips move along with mine and Bec’s, his magic mingling with ours.
Our voices rise. The sky turns black, red, white. Rocks are ripping out of the ground, shooting upwards, burning, turning into birds, cows, cars, people, then back into rocks. Now everything’s rising, the ruins of trees and buildings, corpses, the demons. Gravity loses its grip. Lord Loss tries clinging to the invisible barrier around us, but is ripped away and up. He hurls vile curses at us as he shoots off.
The world is coming apart. Everything’s being destroyed. I’m afraid now, even more than when I thought the demons had us. Bec must be insane. Sixteen hundred years of captivity have driven her mad. She only wants to ruin, make everybody else suffer as she has suffered, tear the world apart. And she can do it. With my magic and Kernel’s, she has the power to wreak a terrible, misdirected revenge.
I try stopping it. I focus on breaking contact, making my lips stop, getting out of here before all is lost. But the magic holds me tight. There’s no escaping. Everything in sight shoots skyward, while the sky itself drops ever further, the tip of the funnel pulsing down… down… down.
Beranabus is frightened too. He was exhilarated when he saw the demons get swept away, but this has exploded out of control. He sees what I see—the literal end of the world. He sits on the ground—the only patch left is the bit contained by our bubble of energy—and gawps at the three of us, eyes wide, twin pools of confusion and fear.
Maybe he thinks about killing one of us to stop it. But I don’t think he could. He doesn’t have the power.
The tip of the funnel is almost upon us. I gear myself up for one last effort, one final push to break the unnatural, destructive bond between me, Kernel and Bec. But before I can attempt anything, the tip of the funnel—blue, like the sky used to be—touches the wall of the invisible boundary.
A flash of light which is every colour. My body explodes, or seems to. I have the feeling of being everywhere and nowhere at once, both an entire universe and an insignificant speck. The funnel sucks me into it. Millions of panels of pulsing lights. Flying from one to another, bouncing around, moving so fast I’m creating a vacuum, sucking the tip of the funnel in after me, pulling it along in my wake. Dimly aware of Kernel and Bec’s magic working in tandem with mine.
We stop bouncing, but move quicker than ever. A cluster of purple lights flash, then bolt together and become a small window. We shoot through it. Yellow lights flash and join—we fly through. A series of flashing lights and windows, one after the other, faster and faster. Curious, I focus on the magic and realise Kernel’s the one creating the windows and directing us through them. I’ve no idea how or why. I don’t think Kernel knows either.
No sense of time or space. Just one window after another, the colours whirring and blurring, a fearsome noise building in the background. Then the lights fade. Unable to see anything now. Total blackness. As blind as Kernel.
The noise continues to build, so loud it could crush a continent. My ears burst. My skull cracks. My brain bubbles away to nothing. But that makes no difference. I still exist. I still hear, think and feel. The noise squeezes my soul. Pain that’s indescribable. No way to scream or release the pressure. A universe of agony.
Then, suddenly, the noise stops. I come to rest. The pain disappears. Delicious, soothing silence. Broken abruptly by a girl’s delighted laugh.
A SECOND CHANCE
At first I think the world and universe have been utterly destroyed and I’m just imagining the laughter. But then the blackness clears slightly. I realise I have eyes again. Blinking, I look around, but can’t make out much. It’s night and I’m in the middle of a cluster of trees. It’s not especially dark—the gleam of a full moon seeps through the branches of the trees—but it’s hard to adjust or focus. My mind’s spinning crazily in a bewildered whir.
“What happened?” Beranabus croaks, rising from a spot nearby. Kernel lies at the magician’s feet, groaning, cradling his head in his hands. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. My ears are searching for something. I’m not sure what it is, until after a few seconds it sinks in—the girl’s voice has gone.
Kernel mutters something, then bolts upright, screaming. “My eyes!” he howls. “The maggots! My eyes! I can’t—”
Beranabus covers his assistant’s mouth and whispers words of magic, a spell to ease the pain. Kernel thrashes wildly, then regains control and stops struggling, though his chest continues to rise and fall rapidly.
Beranabus removes his hand. “Are you going to be all right?”
“My eyes…” Kernel moans.
“Gone,” Beranabus says bluntly.
“But… we must… there has to be some way…”
“No. They’re ruined. But don’t worry—magic will compensate. You won’t be entirely helpless.” Beranabus squeezes the back of Kernel’s neck. “We might even be able to knock together a pair of replacements when we return to the demon universe. If the gods are truly with us, you’ll still be able to see the patches of light and create windows.”
“Like I give a damn about that!” Kernel snaps sourly, but Beranabus ignores the hostility.
“Peace for a few minutes,” the magician says. “I need to determine where we are.”
He turns in a slow circle, eyes closed, breathing softly, trying to pinpoint our position. I know I should keep silent and wait for him to finish, but I can’t. “What did she do to us? The ground breaking apart and rising… the sky and funnel… the lights and windows… the noise and pain. What was all that about?”
“How should I know?” Beranabus growls. “Maybe she was trying to destroy the demons and the spell got out of hand.”
“But the sky! Did you see it? How did she do that? What—”
“Quiet!” Beranabus barks, opening an eye to glare at me. “How can I concentrate with you throwing stupid questions at me?”
“But she tore up the ground!” I shout. “She reversed gravity and brought the sky crashing down. And then she sent us… where? Is this Earth? A demon world? Are we dead?”
“I don’t know,” Beranabus sighs. “I don’t know where this is or how she sent us here— teleportation, I suppose, but I’ve never seen it done that way before. But I know why she did it.” He hesitates, then opens the other eye and looks at me with a shamed grimace. “I made another mistake. There have been far too many lately. I missed the sacrifice being made in the cave. I was wrong about Lord Loss not wanting to reopen the tunnel. And now I know my plan to close it was flawed.
“I told the Disciples that if we collapsed the walls of the tunnel, victory would be ours. The demons would be sucked back to their own universe. That’s how it happened in the past. I assumed the rules would apply the same way in the present.
“Bec told me they wouldn’t.”
“You mean, even if we’d succeeded, we wouldn’t have got rid of the demons?” I ask quietly.
“We’d have stopped others from crossing,” he says. “And those here would have lost much of their power. But the world has changed. There’s less magic in the air. My spells wouldn’t have dislodged the demons. The masters would have remained and even weakened they’d have had enough strength to crush humanity. I don’t think all of the Demonata were aware of that—they certainly didn’t act like they were—but Bec knew we were doomed. To spare us, she worked a spell with you and Kernel to get us out, so we could regroup and try again.”
“What’s there to try?” I sob. “If we couldn’t send them back this time, with all the Disciples to back us up… if destroying the tunnel won’t work…”
“There must be a way,” Beranabus mutters. “That’s why I have to focus. Time’s precious. Bec gave the demons a taste of their own hellish magic, but there’s no guarantee that those sucked up into the sky are dead. Even if they are, the tunnel’s still open. More can cross. We need to return and block their way. So be quiet and let me get my bearings. You can ask all the questions you want after that.”
He closes his eyes and turns again, reaching out with all his senses. Kernel has dragged himself away to sit against a tree. He’s exploring the empty sockets of his eyes with trembling fingers, picking out some dead maggots caught in the corners. I hobble over to check on him, to help if I can, to comfort him if he’ll let me.
Then I see the rocks.
My eyes have adjusted and the light from the moon is strong, even under the cover of the trees. I can’t miss the rocks. They lie scattered everywhere, but a lot are piled up on my left in a large mound. They can’t be real. It isn’t possible. I must be imagining them. Except I’m not. The magic inside me says they’re genuine. It’s smug. Confident. Triumphant.
“Beranabus.”
“Grubbs!” he yells angrily. “I told you not to—”
“I know where we are.”
He opens his eyes a fraction, suspiciously. “Where?”
“You don’t need magic. Just look.” I point to the rocks.
Beranabus frowns. Then he realises he’s seen the mound before and his jaw drops. “No,” he croaks. “It can’t be. This is a trick. Or somewhere that looks like…”
“No.” I walk across, pick up one of the smaller rocks, then lob it down the hole on the other side of the mound—the mouth of an all too familiar cave. “We haven’t gone anywhere. We’re still in Carcery Vale.”
Beranabus is striding around the hole, squinting at it, studying it from every possible
angle. Every so often he stops, mumbles to himself, shuffles towards the hole, then starts marching again.
I’m with Kernel. I’ve wiped away the worst of the muck from around his eyes, using leaves and forest water. “How are you feeling?” I ask.
“There’s not much pain,” he says, “but there will be. You can delay it in circumstances like these, but not indefinitely. I’ll need hospital treatment when the spell wears off. Assuming any hospitals are left…” His head turns left, then right. “Is it day or night?”
“Night.”
“I thought so. But it was day when we attacked. I didn’t think I’d been unconscious that long.”
“You weren’t.”
“Then…” He leaves the question hanging.
“We don’t know,” I tell him. “Beranabus is trying to figure it out.”
Kernel nods slowly. “How do I look?” he asks.
I stare into the vacant pits where his eyes once were. They’re peppered with dead maggots. A few are only half visible, their heads and upper bodies buried in the dark flesh and bone of his sockets. “Fine,” I lie.
Beranabus begins to laugh. I think he’s laughing at my lie and I turn on him angrily. But then I see that he didn’t even hear what I said.
“Of course,” he chortles. “It’s the only answer. There’s just one way she could have channelled that much power, to such an effect. You and Bec are the other two pieces. That’s the only thing that makes…”
He mumbles his way back into silence. I say nothing, waiting for him to get it clear in his head, so he can explain it to me in simple terms. I study him while I’m waiting. He looks weird minus his beard and hair, naked as the day he was born. I guess I look pretty strange too, as bare and hairless as an egg. I’d feel awkward any other time, but things have gone so crazy within the last hour, I’m not bothered by my ultra-smooth nudity.
Beranabus glances up and waves a hand at the trees. Their branches part, granting him an unobstructed view of the moon and surrounding sky. His eyes dart from the moon to the stars. I can practically hear his brain whirring as he performs silent calculations. Then the branches rustle back together and he laughs again. “I knew it!”
