Experimentally, he lowered his head below the “surface” and opened his mouth. There was an oppressive pressure against his tongue as something with the mass but not the substance of water rolled in. Carter knew he didn’t want to try to breathe it in. He’d seen Belasco’s postmortem report. The non-water might not make good drinking, but it would drown him as certainly as a lake of the real thing.
He could feel himself growing buoyant the farther he moved into the layer. He could also see that the layer was rising rapidly up the stairwell; it wouldn’t be long before it reached the ceiling of the upper floor, and then it would be all over for him. Carter took a deep breath, and dived.
If his life hadn’t been in immediate danger, Carter might have taken a moment to enjoy the sensation of flying. It was not as effortless or as swift as the average superhero made it look, but there was still wonder to be had in making steady progress through the air of the front room and back toward the kitchen using a breaststroke. The time limit imposed by his lungs took almost all the pleasure from it, though.
He reached the kitchen doorway, grabbed the frame, and drew himself through, driving himself to the rear door. He grabbed the handle, wondering if the non-water would surge out in an invisible flood when he opened it. Then he remembered that the door would, of course, open inward. If this was normal water, the weight of it would be too much for him to pull against. He had made a mistake going forward; he should have tried to escape from the first story. It was too late to berate himself for the error. If he got out alive, there would be time then.
The handle wouldn’t move at all. It wasn’t that it was locked—he knew he’d left it unlocked—but that it simply wouldn’t move at all, as if the handle had been welded to the mounting plate. There was no sense that it was made up of separate parts, only that the handle, lock, and bolt had become a single immovable unit.
Carter didn’t know how that was possible, but he didn’t know how the non-water was possible, either, and that didn’t stop him from floating in it. He could see clearly in it; there was no sense of pressure on his eyeballs, or the prickling of an alien medium against the cornea. The water wasn’t wet. Cool. That meant it wouldn’t fuck up his pistol.
He drew his Glock, sighted on the glass panel making up the top half of the door, and fired.
The gun fired perfectly, the sound of the detonation only slightly muffled by the strange environment. The good news stopped there. The shot ricocheted off the glass to lodge somewhere in the kitchen wall. There wasn’t even a mark to show where the bullet had struck it.
Carter fired again, but more as an experiment than in any real hope of shattering the glass. Again the bullet struck the target and again it ricocheted off, causing no apparent damage. Carter knew that even bullet-resistant glass would have shown a mark. Whatever Colt had done to seal the glass belonged to the same school of fucked-up physics as the non-water. Carter suspected he could empty the magazine and there’d be nothing to show for it except a few random holes in cereal boxes and the walls.
He reholstered his pistol and turned to go. As he did, he noticed the spent brass from the shots lying on the floor and, on an impulse, gathered them up. There was nothing he could do about the slugs, but he was damned if he was going to leave evidence of his last frantic attempts to escape for Colt to gloat over.
His lungs were starting to labor as he made the bottom of the stairwell and pushed himself up it. The layer had completely flooded the stairs, and he didn’t find breathable air until he broke the glittering surface a foot above the floor of the upper hallway. He hungrily dragged in deep breaths as he waded through the deepening flood, heading for the rear bedroom where Colt kept his old technology. In the corner was a steel-framed chair. Carter picked it up and without hesitation swung it at the rear window.
It was like hitting a concrete wall. There was no reverberation in the glass, no sound beyond the metallic tone of the tubular steel form striking something at least as strong as itself.
Carter went back out onto the landing, taking the chair with him. There was a hatchway into the roof space in the ceiling, the hinged trapdoor bearing a simple ring at one end to allow it to be pulled down with a hook. He used the chair as a step stool, standing on it to reach the hatch. He hooked his finger through the ring and pulled. The trapdoor refused to move an inch, or even a millimeter. It was as solid as if it were just a detail carved from a single great sheet of marble.
Carter stood on the chair, considering his options, the glittering surface of the water that wasn’t there already rising rapidly up his thighs. Colt had created a killing cube within his house, marked out as an area circumscribed by the outer walls, and becoming a greater volume as its height increased toward the first-story ceiling.
It was at his waist now, rising. He forced himself not to panic, not to feel fear. He drew his gun again, and fired at the ceiling. The walls in the kitchen had proved not to be bulletproof; if he could make a hole here, he might be able to use it to breathe through until whatever the non-water was abated and vanished, as it had apparently done in Belasco’s case.
The bullet ricocheted off the ceiling, and there wasn’t even a smudge on the magnolia paint to mark the impact. Colt had thought ahead. Carter had to hand it to him; the man knew how to construct a solid death trap.
The falling brass from the pistol slowed in the air, or whatever was there instead of air. Carter caught it easily. It wasn’t even hot anymore.
The layer was at his chest. Carter wondered what else he could do. The trap was closed, and he couldn’t find a way out. The water that wasn’t water would soon reach the ceiling, and he would survive no more than a few minutes without breathable air. He could feel his chest tightening with panic, but he held it there. Panic would kill him. He might die, but he wouldn’t die like that.
The layer was at his throat.
He thought back, trying to find anything in his recent experiences that might make a difference, some flaw in Colt’s method, some error. He found himself thinking about Colt’s story about Bertrand Russell and the impossible catalogue. An error in the purity of math. Finally, as the layer lapped at his chin, he understood. He understood that Colt had worried at that little hole in math, and torn it wide. Mathematics was everything, and Colt had found the cheat codes of creation.
Colt deliberately hyperventilated, flooding his blood with oxygen to give himself a precious few seconds more. Random thoughts buzzed around his awareness. He recalled reading some list of last words on the Net. Queen Elizabeth the First of England was supposed to have said, “All my possessions for a moment of time.” Being queen hadn’t bought her so much as a second of extra life. What did he have that might do it?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
The layer closed over his face.
Chapter 17
THE PISTOL IN THE HOUSE
Carter had heard there were worse ways to die than drowning, and that was self-evidently true. You could be eaten by army ants, or cook slowly, or dissolve in acid, or explode like that poor son of a bitch in the casino. Even setting aside the really nasty end of ways to die, though, drowning was supposed to be not so bad. Some understandable panic, and then dreams and game over. It sounded okay when it was put like that. On the other hand, not one of the people who had told him this over the years had actually experienced being drowned themselves, so what the fuck did they know?
Carter knew he didn’t want to die right then. He had too many balls in the air, too much unfinished business, and he especially didn’t want to be killed by William Colt. Carter had his standards, and if he was going to die with his boots on, it wouldn’t be because of some smug motherfucker in a button-down shirt killing him with math.
He tried to find an air pocket in the recess where the trapdoor was, huffing in what little was there. Then he felt a closeness trickle in at the corner of his lips, and he clamped his mouth shut.
Now there was nothing to do but wait. Either the layer would d
rop again before he drowned, or he would drown before the layer dropped. Those were the possible outcomes, and he didn’t see any others. He concentrated on staying calm, on avoiding burning through the oxygen in his lungs and in his blood for as long as he could. He thought of nothing, clearing his mind, trying to stretch that moment of his being long enough that whatever timer Colt had put on this fish tank of his would finish first.
The seconds passed. The minutes accumulated. The oxygen burned. The layer did not drop.
Carter could hear his heart beating. It was beating faster as his body started to realize that there was insufficient oxygen in his blood to keep him alive. So, it beat faster to get the oxygen from his lungs around his body, because there’s always oxygen to be had in the lungs. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Beat faster, and faster, and faster. At the same time, the amount of carbon dioxide was building in his lungs as his blood dumped the stuff there, the exhaust from his metabolism. His lungs weren’t keen on high levels of carbon dioxide, and started autonomic actions to clear the stuff out. That’s it, buddy—breathe. You need to breathe. You really, really, really need to breathe.
Carter fought it until he was beyond thought, in an agony of burning lungs and terror of dying. Then his mouth opened, dead air burbled out into non-water, and he drew in the breath that would kill him.
He thought of Lovecraft and what she would think when he didn’t come back. Of what would happen to the store. He thought of Colt winning. He thought of vague aspects of his childhood, trees, sunlight, the smell of grass and hot concrete. His dog, dead all these years. He thought of Charlie Hammond. And he heard Charlie say, right in Carter’s ear, cheerful and clear …
That’ll be The Twist.
Carter convulsed, drowning in midair.
* * *
There was a light, and Carter was not going to it, or even going away from it. It was all around, and he had a sense of motion, as if he was sliding somewhere. Faster and faster. At first it felt like he was on a water slide, then what he imagined it was like being on a luge, and finally he was traveling so quickly, he might as well have been falling. He had vague memories that he had been murdered, drowned, and that if this was what being drowned was like, then it really wasn’t so bad.
The light bent around him, and what lay beyond was brilliantly lit beneath a stark sun, but distorted as by imperfect glass or a thin veil of water. It seemed a shame to him that he couldn’t see more. There were buildings out there, vast, with asymmetric windows and interesting in a way that the skyscrapers of Manhattan weren’t. He really wanted to see them. He really wanted to see them.
He reached out, and his hand broke the veil. He saw the buildings, saw that they were not constructed to any pattern of human usage, that they were inhabited. He snatched his hand back for fear that the denizens of those colossal spires might see him pathetically cringing behind the veil like a child hiding behind a lace curtain.
Yet there was an impression he could not shake off, though it writhed in the muscles in his neck, an apprehension that those intelligences that dwelled in the towers were utterly unconcerned with him, even though they did perceive him now. He was unimportant to them at even the level of fleeting curiosity. The dwindling perspective of their neglect crushed him inwardly.
He was sure he should be dead by now. Did dying really take so long? Were these the last perceptions of a dying mind, crushed into the last moment? Or was this what passed for Heaven and Hell? The afterlife was a fever dream, and his mind would fail long before it could become paradise or torment. That wouldn’t be so bad, he thought. Not so bad at all.
Then death spat him out.
* * *
He awoke to the sound of the wind in the trees, water lapping, and the drone of distant aircraft. Carter rolled over and realized he was lying on grass, not carpet. Somehow he had escaped Colt’s house and ended up on the lawn outside. Even as he was sitting up, part of his mind was telling him that his conclusions were wrong. There was nothing neat and trimmed about the grass he was lying on; it was wild growth. Nor were there any trees much bigger than saplings around Colt’s house. He sat up, looked around, and knew exactly where he was. How he had gotten there, however, was a different question.
The abandoned sneaker from a few days before was still there, and he could even make out the tire tracks of his car. Not much had changed on Waite’s Bill.
Looking around to make sure there was nobody to see, he drew his pistol and quickly checked its load. Three rounds were gone. Three shell cases were in his jacket pocket.
Reholstering his pistol, he next looked at his phone. It worked perfectly, which he knew from bitter experience was not something it would do if immersed in water. In real water. The photo of the bill he had found in Colt’s files was there, just like it should be.
So. All the physical evidence pointed to his recollection being accurate. It was a shame the stuff about physics being broken and how he had spontaneously traveled five miles was also part of the narrative. He decided not to think about it. Thinking about it felt like a mistake. It was tempting not to think about anything. It was tempting to walk into the water and never think about anything again.
There seemed little point in standing there like an idiot in the hope that a solution to an impossible escape from an impossible trap might simply present itself, so Carter walked out onto the road with his hands in his pockets and his head down. He felt he was being watched as he entered the leafed tunnel that led off the spit of land, but he didn’t look back. He felt stupid and inconsequential, and kept thinking of the buildings in his vision. He didn’t want to look back because he didn’t want to give whoever was watching—if anyone was watching—the satisfaction of seeing him look around for them. He didn’t want to look back to see who was watching—if anyone was watching—because he didn’t want to see them. Because he didn’t know what he would see.
The house on the corner where he had spoken to the owner loomed into view, alone and not overlooked by its neighbors, like a solitary guard placed upon Waite Road by the unconscious wariness of civic planners. There was no one outside today, and Carter was glad of that. He would have looked suspicious coming out of the connecting road on foot, and the owner would surely have recognized him. His life was already complicated enough.
Carter, not dead and bemused for it, walked up the rise, phoning for a cab as he went.
* * *
Ken Rothwell had not enjoyed his evening. Emily had been distracted the whole time, even eventually offering a rain check. He’d dropped her off at her apartment, and her good-night kiss had been perfunctory and, once again, distracted. Rothwell smiled and accepted her apologies, assured her it wasn’t a problem, said, “Good night,” and seethed all the way home.
He was no fool, and it hardly took a genius to see that she’d been becoming more distant and preoccupied ever since that PI had turned up and claimed ownership of Hill’s Books. He’d heard nothing from Carter after offering to take the business off his hands. Instead Carter had offered joint ownership to Emily. Rothwell was still trying to decide if that was a nice gesture to her or a considered insult to him. Maybe it was both; on the couple of occasions he’d found them shooting the breeze in the store, they’d seemed as thick as thieves. The chatter dried up pretty quickly when they saw him, too.
Rothwell didn’t think of himself as a jealous man. He was deluding himself.
He arrived back at his town house at two in the morning, having gone around the bars after leaving Emily. His license would have been in danger if he’d been stopped, but he was past giving a fuck. Besides, he had a stash of magic that made a lot of problems like that go away, a stash that came in a variety of denominations.
The only staff he maintained was a housekeeper, Amara, and she had been long gone when he entered and disarmed the alarm. He hadn’t especially been paying attention, but just as the alarm zone indicators all showed green, he could have sworn one zone was showing the alarm was already deactivated there anyw
ay. No, he had imagined it.
He kicked off his shoes and left them lying haphazardly in the hall before going upstairs in his stockinged feet to have at least one more nightcap and maybe decide what he was going to do about the Emily situation. More specifically the Carter situation. Everything had been fine until that guy showed up.
He entered his study and found the lights were already on. He blinked in mild surprise; Amara must be getting slack.
Then he noticed the man.
The man was sitting in an easy chair in the corner, regarding Rothwell with amusement. Rothwell had seen enough movies to know this was about when the man would say some pithy one-liner and shoot Rothwell with a silenced pistol that made a sound like a cat sneezing. Admittedly, in the movies the assassins always dressed a little classier than this man. The button-down collar didn’t work in context at all.
“Hello, Mr. Rothwell,” said the man. He was still smiling.
“How did you get in here?” asked Rothwell. He cursed himself inwardly; this was playing out just like a movie. He was just bringing the sneezing gun moment closer talking like that.
“Ways and means,” said the man. “Actually, they’re why I’m here. I’d like to talk to you about a … mutually advantageous proposal.”
“Why couldn’t you come through my office?”
The smile lessened. “Because I’m an impatient man. I have something of enormous significance and only one lifetime to take advantage of it. It makes me inclined to cut corners. If you’re not interested, I don’t much care. I’ll find somebody else who won’t waste my time. Politicians breed like rats. I’ll find somebody sooner than later.”
“No, no, no,” said Rothwell, chiding the man like a child, “you’re going nowhere until you answer my question. How did you get in here?”
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