by S G Dunster
Knees still shaking, mind exploding with questions, worries, confusion, I climbed after them.
There wasn’t much growing on these dome levels. We were near the central floors, gaping space around us. Dim trunks were visible now and then, muscling their way up toward the top where the light came in stronger. They were eerie in a different way from rotted bodies and exposed bones.
Glass and iron. Stale air.
Waiting. That was the feeling. Like the anticipation before that great blaring boom in Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, or the slow turning of a jack-in-the-box. My neck pricked, my skin itched.
Above us, the ceiling seemed to wave. To move. I thought for a second that it was lightheadedness. Dizziness. But as Eap climbed onto the next level, the dark above him stirred suddenly, and a hundred pairs of light pricks dotted the mass.
Eyes. I had only a fraction of a second to process before the hissing started, swelled, and grew. Now that I was staring, stopped a few stairs below the balustrade, I could make out the flutter of dark flaps of skin, and bent, angular membranes.
“Keep going,” Eap said in a quiet conversational tone. He set out across the floor. This flight of stairs stopped here, on a broad, extensive level. The ceiling of the globe arced directly above us, uninterrupted. There were stripes of darkness, stripes of light.
The creatures huddled in the stripes of dark were crawling, shifting. I could not see what they were. But there were a lot of them. A lot of eyes.
Slowly, I took the last two steps, following Lil and Arapahoe and Eap. As I walked across the empty floor, something huge, dark, with a pale, bald something swooped down from the ceiling. It circled the room.
It was huge. Like, dragon-sized. The wings were as big as sails, and they swept up a breeze that rivaled the St. Anthony March winds as he cleared me by mere feet.
I crouched, covering my head. I looked up at the thing. And froze.
A face. A human face, only dead—grey, slack skin; misty-blind eyes. Its head was bald as an egg, but from the front of the face a black beak emerged, long, dull-black, jutting to a viciously hooked tip. It opened its mouth.
The sound—a combination of scream, hiss, and shrill whistle—made every hair on my body stand up. I felt it buzzing in my bones.
I shivered, huddled as it swooped back up. There were more descending, now. Man-sized bat things. Flying figures swirling through the massive, dank empty space. Something touched my face as it whipped past, a flick of leather on my cheek.
Bats.
I ran. They couldn’t see. But they could see.
The shrieks rained down like lightning strikes, buzzing in the floor, striking through my body like a million ant bites.
“Eap!” I shouted as I ran, shielding my head with my arms. “Where are you? Arapahoe? Lil?”
It was a mistake. The sound of my voice, echoing in that hollow space, boomed back to me a dozen times. All the things whirred toward me. Hundreds, thousands, stirring up the wind to a hectic blast. Many more called out, noises that reminded me of mice. Squeaks and chitters, only as loud as lion’s roars in that echoey place.
Something was burning my cheek. I reached up to touch it and came away with a bloody hand. I ran faster, a flight of stairs rearing up in my vision.
A hacking shriek echoed above me and grew louder—a swoop of sound headed right toward me.
I ran without looking back, lifted my steam-blaster, and fired it. Flame roared just above me, and with a terrible scream, the thing dropped. I ran to avoid the burning body, and covered my ears, still clutching the gun. The noise increased a hundred times, the whirring a frenzy, as huge, dark, ragged shapes spiraled down toward me.
The stairs. I was there. I leapt up them four at a time, nearly stumbling, and changed to three at a time.
Another rapidly expanding shriek, and I raised my gun again, giving a good, long blast of lava. Something soft grazed my hand. A blood-chilling scream and more flame.
Up the stairs. Up the stairs. I could see a landing above me. Something was moving in it—
Eap.
And Lil, being bodily carried by Arapahoe.
There was a way out. A hole . . . a corridor, in the opposite wall.
As I ran for the entrance, I saw that it was choked with webs. I dashed straight in, my footfalls suddenly turning to deafening, Chinese-gong echoes. It was metal, and smaller, closing in around us like an esophagus.
“What is this?” I asked, panting.
Arapahoe, with Lil on his back again, was running. Eap was just behind him.
Suddenly, the volume in the corridor rose. The noise was so painful I yelled, clapping my hands over my ears. Screeches ripped the air apart. Wind gushed in, pushing me forward, taking my feet from under me. I fell flat on my face.
I turned, crawling backward on all fours until I could push myself back to my feet.
Three of the creatures—at least—had followed me in. They scrabbled along the corridor on their bony wing-ribs, curved claws at the tips grabbing for purchase on the walls, and making the metal screech in time with the calls that blasted from their awful, gaping beaks.
The pale, pupil-less eyes didn’t see me. But they could see me. Taste me, already.
Heart galloping, I pulled out my flame gun and turned it on the thick webs that
hung in shreds from the doorway. Immediately, the corridor was a roar of flame, a spectacular eruption, pouring toward me like a hungry river. The men . . . dragons . . . bats . . . dragbats, I called them in my mind—the dragbats shrieked, and I clutched my head for a second. It was like my eardrums had been sliced open. All the echoes, all the noise.
I stumbled and ran through what felt like clouds—webs breaking all around me, feet pounding ahead of me.
The fire.
I was never going to outrun it.
Still I kept going, blood taste in my mouth, guts a great mush of pain. Everything seemed to slow, then go at super-speed, then slow. The webs were piling up on me. I didn’t have time to brush them off. They were clinging to me, winding around me like cotton-candy around a paper-cone.
I stumbled out into another great, empty space.
“There’s a spider on you,” Lil said dryly, just as the roar of fire took over, flaring out of the corridor, curling around its edges. Arapahoe had let her down off his back.
Then the flames shrank back, sullenly receding.
“Gah,” I gasped, falling to the ground.
The webs were sticky. Staticky. Dry. “Spider?” I asked weakly.
She reached over to pluck it out of my hair. She dangled it in front of me. It was tiny. The size of a pinto bean.
In my normal world, a pinto-bean-sized spider would not be tiny. But I’d just run from man-sized bat things. Whose head had those come from?
I was still gasping for breath, but I began wadding up the webs, tossing clumps of them to the floor. When I was finally web-less, I took out my flame thrower and singed them all to fine ashes.
“No more spiders,” I said.
Eap made a sound that could have been a laugh. Monty was perched on his shoulder, looking up at the ceiling.
It was much lower now. Maybe twenty feet above us. And distinctly curved.
“We’re close,” Eap said, his tone smoky and lilting. “Into the web we slide, to what awaits us with jaws open wide.”
“Nice,” I said hoarsely.
“Actually,” Eap replied, “it was clumsy. That last sequence rather unnerved me.” He touched the spot between Monty’s ears, and he leapt down. “But on’s the only available direction. I suppose we must venture.”
“Your head is bleeding.” Arapahoe tapped the crown of his own head.
I reached up and found he was right. My hair was a mass of sticky blood, and it had made a trail down the side of my face, which had stopped bleeding and begun to scab over. “The thing’s hairs,” I said. “They touched me.”
“Our wraiths,” Eap said. “It is good to know we are past that particular t
rial.”
“Who’s to say there isn’t another nest of them in the next room?” Arapahoe said curtly.
Eap narrowed his eyes, gave him a lingering, speculative look. “Don’t ask for trouble, Logan,” he said, as if he were addressing me, not looking directly at my first officer. “Here, it will find us.”
Chapter 23
The room we found ourselves in was empty: bare glass with light glaring down on us, a hub of metal bringing the glass together at the top.
“How do we get up there?” I asked the obvious question, and nobody bothered to answer.
“There’s something.” Lil pointed to a small, low door in the metal strut that halved the dome arcing over us.
The floor was warm.
“The fire,” I said. “It’s not far under us.”
“Let’s hope this takes us up,” Eap said.
Lil knelt. It was a small door, too low to walk through. Watching her open it—a square of metal inset in the beam with a simple hinge—and move through it, I had thoughts of Alice in the Disney cartoon crawling through the door to the White Rabbit’s burrow.
I followed her. Eap and Arapahoe crawled after me.
It was startlingly dark inside, whatever it was we were in. Tunnel? Room? Batcave? I couldn’t tell.
Something grabbed me. Cold, shaky fingers viced my arm as I was about to take another step.
“Don’t. Wait.” Lil. She was breathing quickly, little gasps. “If we find the edge. If we find it, we can get— “
“The edge of what?”
“Don’t— “
Immediately I found it, luckily with just one foot. A slant to the floor—steep, curved.
“Don’t,” Lil said. “Don’t. I—I almost fell in, Logan. I almost fell in.”
My eyes were tuning to the darkness. I was starting to make out something—a deeper blackness against blackness . . . a whorl of metal, and then a pitch-black opening.
In the floor.
The metal’s curves and turns, outline in shadow, leading down to an empty hole, dropping us . . . where? Down?
It looked like a spiral.
“Lil.” I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her teeth chattering. “Are you okay?”
“The metal around it’s so . . . slippery. I slid. I tried . . . I slapped my hands down, flat, on the floor and pulled myself back, but I almost couldn’t because I was so . . . slippery.”
I grabbed her hand. It was slick with sweat. “You’re ok,” I told her. “Lil. You’re here. You didn’t fall.”
Straight down. I was sure of it, now. I could see only darkness, but I felt it creeping in.
Mist. A thickness. A waiting-to-be-told-ness I hadn’t felt for a while, solidifying like drying concrete.
“It goes down,” I said conversationally, “into the mist. How far?”
“Knowing me,” Lil rasped, “probably forever.”
“The spiral.”
“Yeah.”
“The edge is here. Let’s just keep feeling for the edge. See?” I took her hand off my shoulder, pulled her around, and brought her hand down to touch where the metal began to slant, joining with the flat ground. She whipped it back.
“No,” she said. “No, don’t go anywhere near it. If you touch the air inside it, you . . . become nothing.”
“You die?” Arapahoe’s deep voice, just behind us, was comforting.
“No. It takes you apart . . . the pit. And makes you . . . nothing. No dying. No spirit, no . . . nothing.”
“How do you know?” I said to her.
“This is mine, Logan. My nightmare. I know.”
I took a very careful step back, feeling dizzy, thinking of what might have happened if I’d gone even a few inches further. “Geez, Lil,” I muttered.
“Very good,” Eap said, his voice warm with approval.
I turned to give him a look, but his face was just a pale blur.
The problem was, it was truly dark. I could feel the firmness of ground under me, and I could see a welling shadow in the floor, but nothing else was apparent. No noise. No sight. No smell. The edge . . . that was all we had. “We’re going to have to feel for it,” I told Lil.
“No,” she growled, gripping my shoulder with both hands now. “I’m not letting you fall in, Logan.”
“I won’t fall.” Gently, I tried to pry her fingers off, then not-so-gently as she dug in. Finally I dug my own nails in. She hissed and whipped her hands away.
I crouched down, felt the ground in front of me, put a fingertip by my foot and slid it forward until I found where the metal began to slope. Carefully, I spread myself flat on the ground behind my hands and moved perpendicular to the edge, following my fingertip around the rim. “Stay behind me,” I told the others.
I heard all of them shift, crouch down close to me. I edged around carefully, moving slowly.
Achingly slow.
What seemed like a day later, Eap spoke. “Here,” he said.
Carefully, I crawled toward the sound of his voice, my heart nearly leaping from my chest as one of my hands met nothingness. I grabbed the rim and circled the pit carefully, Lil still close behind me, her teeth chattering so loudly it made my own ache in sympathy.
“Wall!” She shouted suddenly. “Logan. There’s a wall here.”
I touched it—vertical, solid, reassuring. “It must run through the pit,” I said. “It’s… a half-circle. Not a full spiral.”
Lil breathed out explosively. “Good. We just need to stick to the wall until we find an opening.”
“I’m sitting,” I said.
She sank down next to me. I heard the others shift as well, lowering themselves back to the ground.
“Here,” Eap rasped, a little to the left of us. “I’ve found something.”
Carefully, hugging the wall, feeling with my feet, I moved in the direction of his voice, and found it—a deep indentation.
An opening. I stood, feeling the edges of it, finding Eap’s clammy hand cupping a sort of doorknob.
I took a deep breath, and let it out in a whistle. “On to whatever’s next,” I said. Immediately, dread fell on me.
No.
Eap opened the door and walked in. I waited for a few long breaths and forced myself to follow him.
My stomach twisted, and my skin went all icy. Even before I took a step in, there he was, illuminated by a bright stream of light in all that dark space. He was rocking, his face skeleton-thin, with the same quality of emptiness to those pale, staring eyes. I was being sucked in.
“No,” I said.
It was like my body became wind, and my skin and bones dissolved, and he was an open window into black space. He breathed me in, and I was him. In his skin. Trapped in his bones. His heart, making the blood pulse through my veins.
Stuck.
I was stuck.
My thoughts swam slow and thick. Drugged thoughts.
Poisoned. I was poisoned.
I could see them—Arapahoe, Eap, and Lil, staring, coming closer. Their images distorted around the edges like a fishbowl lens, and I could pick out only very little clarity. Something touched me with a flare of pain like a hot needle. I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t.
I was stuck.
The touch came again, then again, then on both arms. I think they were my arms. The pain raced from some extremity to my brain and hit it like a burst of fireworks. I gritted my teeth—I had teeth in my head, I knew. I tasted blood.
I can’t get out.
I can’t get out.
My heart beat faster and faster. The world was closing in on me—dark, suffocating—this skin, holding me shrink-wrapped tight inside.
“I can’t move,” I tried to say it.
I could think it.
Those three words. I could think them. So they were real, right?
I can’t move.
“I can’t move,” I gasped, feeling like a sudden rush of wind seared my lungs,
dissolving my stiff skin and letting me melt int
o a real person again. Breathing, heaving . . . salt on my tongue. On my face.
A stab of shame. Why was I crying? Lil hadn’t cried.
The world rushed up to meet me in a burst of colors. Brown. Black. White.
Arapahoe, his hands on either side of my face, holding me up. Liquid dark eyes, staring at me, grounding me. “I am real,” he said to me softly, distinctly, emphasizing each word, “and that must mean you are.”
When he saw I focused on him, when I took a breath, he nodded and released me, and I fell back, away from him, stumbling to the ground.
“Logan,” Lil said.
“Boy, come back to us.” Eap’s voice was wavering. Distorting.
Oh, no.
The colors swirled, and all I could see were glowing-eyed things with grasping branches, coming toward me. I took out my gun and fired. Something shrieked—it sounded like Lil.
Lil.
One of the tree demons shifted and morphed into her colors—I caught, for a moment, a glimpse of gold. Her hair.
Oh no. I backed away, looking wildly at all the tree-people.
There were four of them. Four. One was Lil. One, Eap. One, Arapahoe. And one was coming to poison me and put me back in my chair.
I backed away and met a hard, unyielding surface. They congregated around me. I closed my eyes tight, took my gun, and fired at the one furthest away from Lil.
It caught fire, shrieking, and melded, suddenly, into a bronze-skinned, dark-braided figure—Arapahoe on the ground, his hair aflame. He grimaced and grabbed at it.
I turned and shot at the next one, and it caught fire . . . and stayed. The tree. It whirled its branches, opened its glowing mouth, and then turned into a pile of ashes.
Arapahoe growled, a half-muffled expression of pain.
He was still on fire. His hair . . . it was spreading. His clothes.
I shouted and slid across the floor on my knees, grabbing for his hair, thinking of water, of a huge bucket of water that could put out the fire. He shoved me away, and the water spilled all down my front, missing him completely.
“NO,” he growled. “You can’t bring new things in.”
I stared at him, burning there.
He understood.
Did that mean . . . what did he know about who he was?
