Madame Ruth and Nigel Cholmondeley came in just then, accompanied by a fellow in a white lab robe who introduced himself to me as Healer Ah Murad. “I look forward to learning to apply virtuous reality to healing situations,” he said. This will be an excellent opportunity for me to enhance my knowledge.”
Wonderful. Somebody who saw Judy as a guinea pig, nothing more. I wondered how he’d like enhancing his knowledge of what getting flung out a fifth-floor window felt like. He looked pretty sharp—maybe he could learn to fly before he hit the ground.
I made myself relax. By his lights, Hr. Murad was only doing his job. What he learned from Judy might help him treat somebody else. But that didn’t mean I had to like him, and I didn’t Nigel Cholmondeley was carrying a case large enough that he had to be stronger than he looked. He set it on the empty bed next to Judy’s, flipped open the brass catches, and took out four of the big-eared virtuous reality helmets I’d last seen in the constabulary station.
He looked at the setup in the room, fretfully clucked his tongue between his teeth. “Forming a circle under these circumstances will be rather difficult,” he said, making the a m rather so broad I thought he’d never finish pronouncing it.
Madame Ruth was bluntly practical. “We’ll just turn her around,” she said. “If 11 be easy if her head end’s at the foot of the bed.” Hr. Murad took care of that, moving Judy with a practiced gentleness that said he might have a bedside manner after all. Madame Ruth rounded on the constable. “Hey, you, be useful—move some chairs around for us.” She gestured to show what she wanted.
The constable gave her a dirty look but did as she asked him: he put one chair at the foot of the bed, close by where Judy’s head now rested, and one more to either side at that end of the bed. While he was taking care of that, Nigel Cholmondeley set a virtuous reality helmet on Judy. She didn’t react at all as it covered her eyes and ears.
When he was done, Cholmondeley turned to me and said,
“You sit here.” Here was the seat right across the footboard from Judy. Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth took the other two seats. Grunting, Madame Ruth got up from hers and arranged Judy’s arms so her wrists and hands dangled off the sides of the bed. “Oh, capital,” Cholmondeley said as she sat back down. “Now we shall be able to maintain the personal contact so essential in this exercise.”
He handed me a virtuous reality helmet. I put it on. The world went black and silent. From my earlier experience, I knew I was supposed to take the hands of the people to either side of me. I groped for them. At first, I didn’t find them. I wondered what was wrong until I realized Madame Ruth and Cholmondeley needed to put on their helmets, too.
I wished I were holding one of Judy’s hands, but that wasn’t how the medium and the channeler had set things up, and I had to assume they knew what they were doing. No sooner had that thought crossed my mind than Nigel Cholmondeley’s left hand caught my right. A moment later, Madame Ruth’s right hand took my left in a warm, damp, fleshy grasp.
And a moment after that, the psychic circle complete, we were on the Other Side. Madame Rudi had warned me we wouldn’t be going back to the garden where we’d questioned Erasmus, so I’d been braced for worse. I wasn’t braced for what we encountered.
“We’re here, sure enough,” Nigel Cholmondeley said; as soon as he spoke, I could see his virtuous image.
“But where is Aere?” I asked to help him see me.
“A bad place,” Madame Ruth said, springing into apparent being. “Very bad.”
As in my earlier venture into virtuous reality, they both appeared idealized to my second sight; Cholmondeley handsome, with more meat on his scrawny bones; Madame Rudi minus about half of her corpulent self and her screechy tough-guy accent. As before, I couldn’t see myself at all.
I couldn’t see any skin of Judy, either.
Not as before, I couldn’t see anything but my spirit guides. The Nine Beyonds were dark as an underground cave at midnight. My sight had been totally obscured when I slipped the virtuous reality helmet over my eyes. What I was sensing now felt darker than totally obscured. I don’t know how, but it did.
It was just dark like a cave; it didn’t feel as if we were inside one. If we’d been in a garden before, my guess was that we were in jungle now, jungle on a moonless, starless night a million miles—or maybe farther—from anything of man’s. Though I knew my body was back in a cool room at the West Hills Temple of Healing, the air that seemed to be around me felt hot and wet and smelled as if dungs I didn’t want to know about were just beginning to rot somewhere not far enough away.
Things were moving there, too, and I didn’t know what they were because I couldn’t see them. Whatever they were, I didn’t think they meant us well. This was not a place where we were meant to be. A sudden sharp noise made the self I didn’t have start in alarm: it sounded as if something had stepped on a dry twig, although where you could have found a dry twig in that stifling humidity, I couldn’t tell you.
I remembered the One Called Night was also known as the Crackler. Having remembered, I wished I could forget again.
I turned to Madame Ruth. “How are we supposed to find Judy in all this?” We were somewhere in one Beyond; even if we somehow went over every inch of it (and I was afraid it had a lot of inches), that left eight more to search. We were liable to be there forever, or maybe twenty minutes longer.
The Emperor Hadrian’s death poem ran through my mind; Animula vagida blandula… Little soul, wandering, gentle guest and companion of my body, into what places will you go now, pale, stiff, and naked, no longer sporting as you did? If I’d perceived myself as embodied in that dreadful place, I would have burst into tears. The image fit only too well what I feared was happening to Judy’s spirit.
“We’ll do the best we can, Mr. Fisher,” Madame Ruth answered. “Beyond that, I don’t know what to tell you. This domain is not shaped by us alone; the Power who dwells here influences our perceptions. We must attempt to move, and hope we find ourselves guided toward Mistress Ather.”
She’d warned before we set out that this wouldn’t be as easy as contacting Erasmus had been. She hadn’t warned how bad it would be. Maybe she didn’t know till we tried it; virtuous reality is a technology that’s just opening up, which means one of the things its practitioners are still discovering is what can go wrong.
I got the feeling that if anything went seriously wrong in the Nine Beyonds, Hr. Alt Murad would learn some things he hadn’t expected—and some new intrepid explorers of virtuous reality would have to try to rescue three more spirits lost in this suffocating place.
Would they have any better fortune than we did?
Madame Ruth had said we had to try to move, to explore the Nine Beyonds and hope we found Judy. Move we did, but it wasn’t easy. The Nine Beyonds resisted every metaphysical motion we made. We cried out, but everywhere in vain. It was as if we were drunk, as if the Nine Beyonds themselves were having sport with us, mocking our search.
We might as well have been wading through mud, through quicksand, through hot dinging slime.
And it felt as if the area in which we stood and moved was growing smaller all the time. With everything perfectly black all around us, with Madame Ruth and Nigel Cholmondeley the only things my second sight could perceive, I don’t know how I got that impression, but I did. That led me to another interesting question (if interesting and horrible are synonyms): what would happen if it closed real tight around us?
Someexperiments you’d rather not see performed, especially on you.
No sooner had I thought that than I discovered I wasn’t the only one feeling the invisible closing in. Voice tight with concern, Nigel Cholmondeley said, “I think we had best withdraw, lest we be overwhelmed by that which lurks in darkness here.”
“How do we get away?” I asked.
“Break me circle; free your hands,” Madame Ruth said.
“Quicldy!”
That hadn’t been easy even when we were leavi
ng the virtuous reality garden. Remembering you had an actual physical body that could do things was tough; making it do those things tougher.
And not for me alone—I watched the virtuous images of Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth twist in concentration as they struggled to make their bodies respond to their wills.
No doubt my own virtuous image bore a similar grimace in their second sight Madame Ruth had been right; we needed to hurry. Something was breathing down the neck I hadn’t brought along to the Nine Beyonds. I didn’t know what the One Called Night could do to me, but I was very conscious of operating on the Power’s turf—or rather, muck. If it took hold of me…
Just then, one of us (to this day, I don’t know who) managed to get a hand loose and break the circle. Coming back wasn’t like returning from the garden; I seemed to be falling and falling in a forever compressed into maybe a second and a half. Worse still, I thought the One Called Night was falling after me, falling faster than I was, reaching out with black, black hands in which never a star would shine.
Under the virtuous reality helmet, my eyes flew open. I saw only darkness there, too, but it was a darkness I knew, the familiar darkness of This Side. Unlike the blacker than black of the Nine Beyonds, I knew what to do about this. I yanked the helmet off my head and sat blinking in the mellow afternoon sun.
I got my helmet off just ahead of Nigel Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth. Their faces—their real, everyday faces, not the idealized images they bore in the realms of virtuous reality—were pale and haggard, as yours would be, as mine surely was, after such a narrow escape.
Cholmondeley leaned forward, pulled off Judy’s virtuous reality helmet Her face showed nothing, just as it had before the helmet went on. Her spirit hadn’t been in there to experience what we’d gone through.
Madame Ruth wiped sweat from her forehead with one sleeve. I didn’t think the sweat had anything to do with wearing the helmet. “Jesus,” she muttered. “It tried to follow us back.”
Too bloody right it did.” Cholmondeley also sounded shaken to the core. “I think it used Mistress Ather as its conduit: it controls her spirit, after all.”
“I never heard of that,” I said.
“Nor had I,” Cholmondeley answered. “Nor, so far as I know, has any practitioner of virtuous reality. Of course, there is the caveat that anyone encountering the phenomenon at full strength, so to speak, is unlikely to remain a practitioner of virtuous reality, or, indeed, of any trade thereafter.” He essayed a laugh; it came out as a series of nervous little barks.
The procedure was unsuccessful?” Hr. Murad asked. He hadn’t been there with us. Lucky him.
“Buddy, you’re lucky—we’re lucky—it’s us sittin’ here talking to you, and not the One Called Night,” Madame Ruth said. Nigel Cholmondeley’s nod in support of that was as herky-jerky as his laugh had been.
I stood up. I felt as if I’d been away from my body for a long time, slogging through the steaming, lighdess swamps of the Nine Beyonds. The physical part of me, though, the part that hadn’t left the chair, rose now so smoothly that I knew virtuous reality had fooled me again, Before Hr. Murad could turn Judy the right way around on her bed, I leaned over the footboard and looked down into her face. Her eyes were open, and looking back at me.
Nothing showed in them, any more than it had before: no recognition of me, no awareness of where she was.
I kept looking, down into the blackness other pupils. Was the One Called Night hiding in that blackness, peering back at me through those portholes into This Side while it held her spirit trapped in the Nine Beyonds? I had no way to tell.
When I stepped back, the healer did put Judy back where she belonged. Nigel Cholmondeley was glumly packing the virtuous reality helmets back into their travel case. He set a hand on my arm. Terribly sorry, old man, I truly am. I’d hoped for better results.”
“So did I.” I looked at Judy again. If we couldn’t get her spirit back from the Nine Beyonds, she was going to stay in that bed for the rest of her life, eating when they fed her, drinking when they gave her water, wiggling every now and then for no reason at all. And what would happen when she died? Could her spirit break free of the One Called Night even then?
I shivered all over, and the room wasn’t that cool. In a way, she was even worse off than Jesus Cordero. With no natural soul of his own, he at least had hopes of getting an artificial one from Slow Jinn Fizz. But what could Ramzan Durani do for Judy, whose spirit was stolen rather than absent?
What could anyone do?
Hr. Murad stepped in front of Madame Ruth as she was about to go out the door. “Wait, please,” he said in the tone of somebody trying—not too hard—to be polite about giving an order. “We have not yet fully examined the etiology of your treatment’s failure.”
Madame Ruth looked down her nose at him. She was taller than he was, as well as wider. “If you don’t get out of that doorway, sonny, I’m gonna squash you flat. You ask nice, maybe we’ll talk about it later. Right now I need a drink or two a whole lot more than I need you.” She advanced. Hr. Murad retreated. Nigel Cholmondeley followed in her massive wake.
I followed, too. Leaving Judy was a knife stuck in my heart, but staying there, with her like that, hurt even worse. I felt another sleepless night coming up. I’d had too many of those lately, and earned every one of them.
“Excuse me,” I called to Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth as they were about to step on the slide back down to the lobby.
They both paused. “Sorry like anything we couldn’t help ya, Mr. Fisher,” Madame Ruth said. Tm just glad we got ourselves back to This Side in one piece. Too bad we couldn’t bring your girl friend with us.”
“Most unfortunate,” Nigel Cholmondeley agreed.
“For Judy especially,” I said, at which the two of them had the grace to nod. That gave me the nerve I needed to go on:
“If I can come up with anything that would give us a better chance, would you be willing to take another try at rescuing her from the Nine Beyonds?”
They looked at each other. I didn’t like the look; it said, Not on your life, bud. Madame Ruth opened her mouth to answer, and I’d bet a big pile she was about to say that out loud. Cholmondeley raised a finger to stop her; he was the smooth man of the pair. What he said was, “It would have to be something quite extraordinary, Mr. Fisher.” Which was also no, but sugar-coated so it went down sweeter. Besides, he wouldn’t want to drive away business by coming right out and saying virtuous reality just couldn’t do some tricks.
So he let me hope—a needle—eye’s worth, maybe, but hope. The last thing at the bottom of Pandora’s box, and generally running too many lengths behind trouble ever since.
But it was all I had, so I clasped it to my bosom.
What I didn’t have was any idea of what I might come up with that would give us a better chance in the Nine Beyonds.
The One Called Night seemed to rule the roost there. Why not? It was his roost If we could make him confront us on neutral ground, so to speak, we’d have a better chance of making him release Judy’s spirit. But how? The Nine Beyonds were his home on the Other Side. I didn’t see any way to force him out. Beat him on his home ground, then? We’d tried that already, with no luck.
That left—nothing I could see.
Madame Ruth and Nigel Cholmondeley had already slid away. I stood by the slide, doing my best to come up with the brilliant idea to save the day. It’s always easy in the adventure stories. I’d even done it myself, when I summoned the Garuda Bird to the Devonshire dump.
Not this tone.
Another sleepless night. This time I mean it literally.
When it got to be about one in the morning, I just gave up and made myself a cup of coffee. If I was going to be awake, I might as well be awake, I figured. Somehow I’d stagger through the next day and somehow, after that I’d sleep.
Meanwhile…
Meanwhile, I prowled around my flat For want of anything better to do, I cleaned it cleaner
than it had been since just before the High Holy Days the year before. When I moved the couch and chair to clean under them, I found close to a crown and a half in loose change, so I even turned a profit on the deal.
I read an adventure story, paid some bills, wrote some letters, all the things you do in slack time. I wrote to people who hadn’t heard from me in so long, I hoped the shock wouldn’t send ’em on to the Other Side.
Every so often, I’d get up from the kitchen table—which doubled as desk—and go back in the bedroom. Not to try to go to sleep: I’d given up on that I’d push back the curtain and look out at the night. It was very dark out there, no moon, just a couple of stars I could see. I might have thought it looked really black if I hadn’t almost been trapped in the Nine Beyonds that afternoon. Next to that place, Angels City night was high noon in the desert.
Back out to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. As I had once or twice before, I wished for an ethemet set to give me some noise to be lonely with. With quiet all around me, I couldn’t keep from thinking, and none of my thoughts were ones I wanted.
I went back to the bedroom again. Still night outside. What a surprise. My alarm clock told me it was half past four.
Maybe I was imagining things, but I thought the horological demon sounded slightly worried at having me awake and prowling around at that hour. Maybe I alarmed it for a change.
I sat down on the bed. The state I was in, that proved another mistake. It made me remember all the times Judy and I had lain there together, and how unlikely we were to do it again. My eyes filled with the easy tears that can come when you’re half underwater with exhaustion. An effect of the law of contagion? I don’t know.
Out to the kitchen again, this time for breakfast You stay up all night, you get hungry. I was washing the dishes when a pigeon landed on the tile roof above me with a noise like a flying carpet crashing into the side of a hill in the fog. There have been times when that kind of predawn rackets bounced me out of bed in a fright. If I’d been asleep, it might have happened again. As things were, I welcomed the noise—it showed something besides me was alive and moving.
The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump Page 38
