by Tad Williams
"Yes? Ramsey, what?" He sounded even worse, if that was possible.
"Christabel's in a coma, damn it! A Tandagore coma!"
"What?" He sounded genuinely stunned. "How can that be?"
"Don't ask me—she's lying on her bed. Her parents just found her." He tried to think it through. "There are some sunglasses lying next to her. . . ."
"Oh. Oh, my goodness." Sellars did not speak for a moment. "I had precoded an entry sequence, but . . . but only for use if they agreed to it. . . !" Despite the strain in his voice, the unfamiliar hesitations, he suddenly became focused, sharp. "Tell them not to move her. She must be entering the system now. I have to go." For a moment, there was silence, but before Ramsey could break the connection, Sellars' voice came back. "And tell them I am truly sorry. I did not want this to happen—not this way. I will do whatever has to be done to . . . to bring her back."
Then he was gone.
Ramsey had left them sitting silently in the bedroom, cradling the unmoving body of their little girl. Despite his own vague feelings of responsibility, or perhaps because of them, he could not wait to get away.
He picked up the pad to talk to Olga, wondering whether he should tell her what was happening on his end, thinking that if she remained as she had been the last time they had spoken, she would not even listen. Staring at the screen, his thoughts jumbled, it took him several seconds before he realized what he was seeing.
Olga Pirofsky still sat beside the cluster of massive black pods, swaying from side to side with her face in her hands, a picture of terrible and all-consuming grief. She clearly had no idea what was happening behind her.
The lids of two of the pods were rising—slowly and apparently silently. For a moment, Ramsey felt that same sense of helpless, almost sexual horror that he had felt as a child in the darkness of a movie theater. An alien spacecraft, the door opening, something about to come out—but what would it be?
But this was no movie. This was real.
A shape lurched in the nearer pod, then began to drag itself upright, bathed by the dim lights around the inside rim of the lid.
Ramsey had the line open and was shouting at the screen now, but Olga clearly was not receiving his call. He could only shout her name over and over as an immensely fat, horribly naked man climbed out of the glowing pod.
She slid the Storybook Sunglasses on. It was good to be in the dark behind the lenses. She could hear her mother's voice in the other room. Mommy was really angry—angry at Mister Sellars, angry at Daddy, even angry at Mister Ramsey, who didn't seem to have done anything as far as Christabel could see.
It was good to be in the dark. She wished she could have sunglasses for her ears as well.
"Tell me a story," she told the glasses, but nothing happened. The lenses stayed black. There was not even a message from Mister Sellars. It made her sad—he had sounded so tired, so hurt. She almost wished that her mother and father hadn't found out about her secrets with him—her visits, the ways she had helped him, all the things, all the secret things. How he smiled and called her "little Christabel."
Their secret word.
"Rumplestiltskin," she said. Light opened out in front of her eyes like a flower.
"This will be like a call to someone far away," Mister Sellars' voice said in her ears. "Or like going on the net. I'll be with you in just a moment. . . ."
"Where are you?" she asked, but his voice was still talking, not hearing her. It was another message, a recording, like before.
". . . And then I will stay with you, I promise. But I am doing many things, little Christabel, and it may take me a moment to reach you. Don't be frightened. Just wait." The light was moving now, dancing, spinning. It made her head hurt. She tried to reach up and take the sunglasses off but for some reason she couldn't find them. She could sort of feel her head but it seemed to be changing shape—first her hair felt funny under her fingers, then it didn't feel like hair at all. Then the light swept away from her, pulling her with it as if she had been sucked down the drain of the bath, and the light had a noise, too, a moan like the wind or like children crying.
"Stop it!" she yelled. She was really frightened now. Her voice sounded wrong, close in her head but strange and echoey and far away, too. "I don't want to. . . !"
The light was everywhere. Then the light was gone. Everything was dark and she couldn't feel herself touching anything. For a few seconds she was all alone, as alone as she had ever been in her life, like in a bad dream, but awake, and there was nobody else anywhere in the whole world, not Mister Sellars, not Mommy, not Daddy. . . .
But then there was someone else.
Scared, she held her breath, but it was more like thinking about holding your breath because she couldn't feel her chest get tight. She felt like she was about to pee all over herself, but that didn't feel quite real either. Something was looking for her. Something big. It was in the darkness.
It touched her. Christabel tried to scream, tried to hit, but she had no mouth, no hands. It was so cold! It was like all the black had frozen, like she was in the refrigerator with the door closed and the light out and she couldn't get out and nobody heard her and nobody heard her and nobody. . . .
The big, cold something touched her inside her head.
That story on the net, the one I wasn't supposed to watch, about a giant gorilla that picked up a lady and smelled her and looked at her and it was so scary, and I thought he's going to throw her down on the ground or put her in his mouth and chew her with his teeth, and then I peed my pants and I didn't even know it until Mommy came in and said Ohmygod what are you watching Mike you left the screen on and now she's wet herself and ruined the couch because of your stupid monster I told you she was too young. . . .
And then it let her go. The big, cold something passed through her like a wind, and she could smell it, but she was smelling how it thought, how it felt, and it was tired and sad and angry and even very very frightened but it didn't care about little girls anymore and it let her go.
She was hanging in darkness. She was lost.
"Christabel?"
When she heard Mister Sellars' voice, his kind, hooty-soft voice, she couldn't help it. She started to cry, then she was crying so hard that she thought she wouldn't stop, not ever, not ever.
"I w–want . . . Mommy." She could barely make the words.
"I know," he said. "I'm sorry—I didn't mean for it to happen this way." She couldn't feel him, not like she had felt the freezing dark, but she could hear him, and in all the blackness that was a tiny, good thing. She tried to stop crying. She had hiccups. "I'm with you now," Mister Sellars said. "I'm with you, little Christabel. We have to go. I need your help."
"I didn't mean to do it. . . !"
"I know. It was my fault. Perhaps it was meant to be—but perhaps not. In any case, it will all be over soon. Come with me."
"I want my Mommy."
"I know you do. And you are not the only one." Now she wasn't quite as scared as she had been and she could hear how much he was hurting. "Just come with me, Christabel. I'm going to take you to meet someone. I'm sorry this happened but I'm glad you're here, because otherwise I would have had to send your friend off to meet him by himself."
Then she heard a new voice—a surprising voice, because she knew the person the voice belonged to couldn't be talking, because he was asleep on the bed like a dead person. But Mister Sellars was also asleep like a dead person, wasn't he?
Am I asleep like that too? Won't Mommy and Daddy be frightened?
"Get me out of here!" the voice shouted. "Not doin' this mierda no more!"
"Cho-Cho," she said.
For a moment, he didn't talk. Christabel hung in the blackness and wondered if this was what it felt like to be dead. "Weenit?" he said at last. "That you?"
"Yes." Mister Sellars' breath was all funny and rough, as though he had stepped away for a moment and then run back. "That is her, Señor Izabal. And we are going somewhere together. You two are
going to find a little lost boy. And afterward . . . and afterward I will do my very best to take you both home."
"You all crazy," Cho-Cho's voice said. "Not gonna do nothin'!"
But as the darkness began to turn into light—a gray like a morning sky, but everywhere at once, below as well as above—Christabel felt someone reach out and take her hand.
"You okay, weenit?" Cho-Cho whispered.
"I think so," she whispered back. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," he said. "Ain't scared of nothin', me."
Whether that was true or not, his fingers tightened on hers as the gray light grew and grew.
Paul and Orlando carried Martine down the twisting ledge until they came to where the others were blocking the path. "Move!" said Paul in a loud whisper. "Didn't you hear that madman? He's coming after us."
"The path is gone," Florimel said. "It has dropped away. Melted. Something."
"Like the mountain," Sam murmured as she staggered up behind Paul and set Cho-Cho down on the stone. "All gone."
So this is where it ends, Paul thought. All that drifting, all that running. It got narrower and narrower until I reached the end of the trap. He looked at the others, Nandi, young T4b, all of them staring-eyed, their haunted, not-quite-real faces devolving into crude planes, the colors bleeding out of their skin and clothes and even the stones before which they stood. The walls of the pit seemed strangely abstract, like the brushstroked masses of some hurrying Expressionist painter.
"We can still fight," said Orlando. Paul thought it was a statement so patently ridiculous that it was almost comical, a bleak joke for which their pointless deaths would be the only suitable punch line.
Martine shuddered and tried to sit up. "Is th–th–that you, P–Paul?" She was trembling so powerfully that he crouched beside her and held her legs, afraid she would shake herself right over the ledge and down into the deeps. That endless blackness was the only thing that still looked entirely real.
"It's me," he said and gently touched her face. She was cold. He was cold, too. "We're all here, but we need to be quiet. That thing—Dread—is looking for us."
"I h–haven't let go," she said. "I can . . . feel . . . where !Xabbu is—and b–beyond. I can even feel where . . . the Other is. All the way . . . to the end." Her shivering had lessened, though she seemed farther away than ever.
"I'm here."
"Cold. It's so cold. Vacuum cold."
He tried to rub her hand but she pulled it away. "That is so strange—I can feel you touching me but it is like it is happening on another planet. Don't. Let me think, Paul. It's so hard . . . to keep . . . to hold. . . ."
"Hello, chums," Dread's voice crooned. "I know you must be getting tired of waiting for me." The path behind them was still empty, the light bent and strange. "I'd have been with you by now, but I've been playing with the kiddies. Listen." A thin, sobbing shriek echoed through Paul's ears, through all his companions too, making them flinch and cry out, linked by a circuit of horrified helplessness.
"He's taking his time on purpose," Florimel groaned. "Sadist. He wants us to suffer first."
"Smelling us scared, like," T4b said.
"Silence!" hissed Nandi. "We don't know how far away he is—he could be trying to lure us into giving ourselves away."
"How much trouble will he have finding us on this path?" Florimel said with ragged contempt. "I will not crawl."
"Me neither," said Orlando. "I don't care if he's Dracula or the Wolfman or the Wicked Witch of the West—we'll put some pain in his venture before . . . before the end." As the boy spoke, Sam Fredericks climbed unsteadily to her feet beside him, reflected light flickering on her terrified, determined face. Paul felt a swelling in his heart, something he could not name. These poor, brave children. How can this be happening to them?
"Cold. . . !" Martine shouted. Startled, Paul clamped a hand across her mouth. She shook it off. When she spoke again it was barely a murmur. "I can feel the Other—but he's so small! Frightened! The children . . . they aren't crying anymore. They're quiet, so quiet. . . !"
"It is cold where the Other is." Sellars' voice made them all jump.
"He's back," Sam said tunelessly.
"There is no time to waste." Cho-Cho now lay like a fitful sleeper at Sam's feet, Sellars' bizarrely precise voice issuing from the boy's open mouth. "Martine, I will try to reach you—to join my end of the connection to yours. It will be a strange feeling, I'm sure, but please try to not to fight me."
"Can't think. Too cold . . . hurts. . . ."
"The Other is imprisoned in a great coldness, both inside and out," Sellars said, rapping out the words in a great hurry. "If you understand that, you will be less afraid. He is not a machine, or at least he did not begin that way. He was a child, a human child, corrupted by The Grail Brotherhood and made the heart of their great immortality machine."
Paul felt a wash of helpless hatred. The Other, little Gally, Orlando, and Sam Fredericks, the screaming victims beside the Well—all those innocents sacrificed so a man like Jongleur could crawl on through more years of life.
"Frightened. . . ." Martine wept. "He is so small. . . !"
"He always has been, at least to himself. Frightened. Abused. Kept in the dark, metaphorically and literally, because they feared his almost unlimited potential. He affected the minds of those who guarded him, so they exiled him—put him in the crudest, most secure prison they could devise."
"Prison. . . ?"
"A satellite." Sellers spoke quietly, but his words seemed starkly loud on the ledge above the abyss. "The Other is in a satellite, orbiting above the Earth. Cryogenic engines keep his metabolism slow, make him more controllable—or so they thought. They banished him to the emptiness of space, with fail-safe devices on his prison so that if anything went wrong they could fire the rockets and push him out of orbit and into deep space." Sellers' voice was dry, cracked. "The Apep Sequence, Jongleur called it. After the serpent that tried every night to swallow the flying boat of Ra, king of the gods."
Martine gasped. "Hurry! I . . . I can't . . ." She twitched, twitched again—it was strangely rhythmic. Paul looked down to see her hands moving in a strange pattern, the fingers held in front of her chest, weaving in and out. "!Xabbu, too . . . he hurts. . . ."
"I am struggling to make the connection, even as I speak," Sellars said through the sleeping child. "It is . . . like threading a needle . . . with a thread a million miles long. And . . . I am holding the far end . . . of the thread."
Something was moving now on the far side of the Well—a point of darkness so pure that even in this shadowy netherworld Paul could see it striding down the path at a weirdly unhurried pace, winding along the wall of the pit.
"He's coming," Paul whispered, knowing it was useless to say it, knowing Sellars could not work any faster. "Dread's coming." He touched Martine with his hand, the merest featherlight brush of his fingers on her leg. She moaned and writhed.
"No!" Her hands were moving faster now, clenching and unclenching, the fingers almost too swift to see in the weird half-light. "Don't! Hurts!"
"Please don't touch her," Sellars gasped. "Please. It . . . is . . . very close. Very . . . difficult."
The shadow-shape turned along the wall, still following the path. Although it was still far away, Paul could see the gleam of two pale eyes. His heart sped even faster, hammering in his chest. We're feeling what the Other feels, he realized. But that's what I've felt all along when the Twins were chasing me—its fear of them, its terror of Jongleur. I'm not even a real person, I'm just part of the bloody network code. I don't even have my own feelings!
The dark man walked down the path.
What did all this truly mean? Paul's panicked thoughts flared and sputtered. What was the reality here? A murderer, or the devil Himself? A boy who thought he was an operating system? An operating system that thought it was a little boy who had fallen down a well? Madness. Nightmares.
It really is the Red King's dream. It
's all true. When the dream's over, when this network dies, Paul Jonas will blow out like a candle.
But I'm not even Paul Jonas, he thought with a sudden, chill clarity. Not really. I'm the residue of the Grail process—a copy, like Ava. I'm just a better copy, that's all.
He looked at his companions, frozen, staring. The only sound was Martine's harsh breathing.
It's the end, he thought, and I'm still running. Still drifting. But I said I wouldn't do it anymore. . . .
Sellars needs time. This thought tore across the first like a sudden scream. The one thing we don't have. He needs time to save my friends.
And what is there for me. even if I survive? An eternity in this looking glass universe?
The black shape turned the last bend, moving in an invisible cloud of terror.
"Hello," Dread called, laughing. "Have you been waiting long?" The monster's eyes and smiling teeth gleamed out of the head-shaped shadow, as though it wore a charred mask of Comedy. "Waiting for old John? Waiting for your old chum Johnny Dark?"
The end, Paul thought. And then he ran.
He could hear the others shouting behind him, the raw surprise in their voices, but it was just noise. The poisonous fear that surrounded the shadow-figure swept over him, a stormfront of nerve-jangling, limb-deadening panic that slowed him until it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other. He staggered up the path like a man running against gale winds.
The thing called Dread stopped to watch his approach. He could feel its amused interest, but that was a solitary note in a roaring symphony of utter terror which grew louder and stronger the closer he got.
Zero. The dark. He couldn't think. He pushed himself forward two more steps. Lost. Lost! Running in the dark, lost! He took another step, his heartbeat so swift it was almost uniform, a zipper being pulled along its track, beatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeat. . . .
"So which one are you?" The thing reached out for him with a hand cold as the bottom of a grave. Its empty eyes widened as Paul took one last stumbling step, then his brain and spine could not drive him any farther. He fell to the ground at the shadow-man's feet, twitching in helpless horror.
