Having completed a full circle of one another, I stop moving. “Whatever this is—this . . . friction between us—it can end. I am not offering my mind to you. You can just give up on that. Got it?”
Zurvan smiles and spreads his hands again. “We understand each other now. We don’t need to fight. Maybe we work together. Perhaps when I leave here I’ll even remember you, send you some gifts of your own to keep you entertained. A pretty girl perhaps? Someone to keep you company? You should want to be my friend. I could be very useful to you when I depart this place.”
“Not if I leave first.” The statement is out of my mouth before I’ve thought about it and I regret it immediately.
Zurvan raises an eyebrow, appraising me. “So you have some plans of your own? How interesting. How is it that you hope to accomplish this? You know someone too, perhaps?”
I do my best to play the statement off. “No. I mean, if you can do it, then I can too, right? How hard can it be?”
Zurvan’s gaze is indecipherable. I can’t tell if he can read the lie on my face.
“We will see then, won’t we?” He gathers up his robes and holds them tightly to himself. “The ones who forced me here—the ones who took my life from me—they don’t know how powerful I’ve become. When I return, I’m going to show them. I’ll send them here and let them see what it means to be truly timeless.”
He glances about the street and up at the palm trees, taking in the scene. “Thank you for showing me this place. It is so full of sun and life. Perhaps when I am free, I will visit it.” With that he turns around and opens up a portal, the sand dunes again, but this time he only creates it on his side of the street. He steps into the memory and, with a final wave of his hand and an uneven smile, he vanishes.
I back away from the site of Zurvan’s disappearance carefully. I summon my own memory, a ranch in Montana. A hillside under the stars. I step through the portal and close it behind me.
I have a lot to think about. Convenient, as there are not a lot of other duties for me in the Neverwhere.
This is a good memory. Safe.
I sit down on the small hill in the prairie grass and stare up at the million stars overhead, letting the stress of my encounter ebb away. Even without a physical body, my mind has tensed in Zurvan’s presence—a clenched muscle that needs to be released. I let the tension go, imagining it seeping into the ground around me.
I don’t know all of the details of Zurvan’s life, but I’ve seen enough. I’ve seen his methods, and he uses tools I can’t duplicate. I have no following of disciples in the real world avidly working for my second coming. I don’t have a spaceship or a fiery church. My only hope of getting out of this place lies with a version of me who clearly doesn’t want to let me in any more. Though I can’t really blame him, what with me possessing his mind in the middle of the night and scaring Mym half to death.
The outline of a ranch house is just visible in the darkness a few hundred yards behind me, but the view in the other directions is all starlight. The last time I stared at this sky I was with Mym. A night full of questions and conversation and meteors. It was the first night she’d met me as a young woman, and I was trying so hard to make a good impression.
I can only wonder where she is now. What happened after Benny scared her? She looked so terrified as she ran away from me. Did she come back? Is she safe? I contemplate the night, waiting for the stars to fall—hoping that the meteors that rained down that night might return and bring me some answers.
The cosmos stays fixed and undisturbed.
The starlight is false. Even as I stare at it, the sky shimmers. The true reality of this place is color and time. There are deep clouds beyond that veil of black. Bold clusters of iridescent threads spun into intricate webs like so much cotton candy. Timestreams? Eternity? I can sense it out there, but for now I’m happy with my mirage. I am a mere memory of a man. Whatever binds me to the reality I remember seems a fragile and precarious tether in the face of all that forever. I don’t wish to comprehend eternity. Not yet.
I think about the voices I heard in Zurvan’s memory. He’s taken so many souls here. What must they feel like, trapped inside another mind, then wrapped in all this Neverwhere? Even now I feel like I can hear their whispers. Whispers like wind in the tall grass. Soft rustles, like breathing. Like footfalls.
The hands are around my neck before my other senses can warn me. They clamp tight, ten sharp fingers pressing on my throat.
No! Not again.
I tip sideways, dragging the weight of my attacker down with me and rolling to try to dislodge him. I’m smothered by the weight of him, but get one foot under myself and heave, pitching both of us forward in a tangled knot. I crash into the ground partially upright and roll down the hill, my view oscillating between grassy earth, starry sky, and the enraged face of Benny, teeth bared and determined to choke the life out of me.
We tumble down the hill in a cluster of legs and arms so confusing that I have trouble telling where I end and Benny begins. I lash out with whatever appendages I can aim, jabbing elbows, heels, and fists toward any parts of him I can hit. Benny groans when we impact the earth at the bottom of the hill. His hands fall away from my neck.
“What the hell, man?” I scramble upright, backing away and probing my neck for damage. Benny is up again in a moment and chasing after me. He leaps and tackles me to the ground, flailing at my face with his fists. I bat them away as best I can, then throw a few punches of my own, trying to batter and pry him off me. We shear apart once more and stagger to our feet, a yard or two away from one another.
“We’re already dead!” I yell at him. “What are you trying to do to me?”
“You’re not dead enough!” Benny yells, and hurls himself at me again. This time I dodge his attack and send him sprawling into the grass.
“Hey, man. There’s no point to us—” I don’t get the rest out because Benny is back up and crashing into me again—a relentless and unreasoning force. I thud into the hillside and block my face from Benny’s attacks. I might be dead, but his fists still hurt. I’ve been punched in the face enough times in real life to remember what it feels like, and it seems that memory is working against me now. “GET. OFF.” I shove Benny back again, trying to free myself from his wild punches.
“I won’t let him have her!” Benny yells. “If you won’t stay away from him, then you leave me no choice!” He comes at me again with hands outstretched for my eyes. This time I’m ready and sidestep him, unleashing a right hook that catches him in the side of the head and spins him away from me.
“I’m not your enemy, damn it!”
He scowls at me and throws out his hands. This time he’s not reaching for me though.
“What are you—”
He rushes me again, but this time I no longer have the hillside behind me. As he crashes into me, we plummet through the portal he’s opened and into a different memory. Wet sand. St. Pete Beach in summer. The sunny beach carries on for miles, another memory bright with use. No fog to ruin this view. I’ve spent hundreds of hours on this white sandy stretch between Pass-a-Grille and Treasure Island, lounging with friends or motoring by in boats. The place is normally teeming with leather-skinned retirees and sunburnt tourists. Now Benny and I are the only patrons and he’s dragging me headfirst into the warm Gulf, my eyes blinking away seawater as he splashes his way forward.
I’ve stopped struggling. Benny shoves me into the water, holding me under in an attempt to drown me. I knock his hands away from my throat a few times, but finally just lie there. I’m not going to drown. A cloud of air bubbles escapes my mouth as I attempt to shout underwater.
“THIS ISN’T GOING TO WORK!” The words come out as a garbled burble.
Benny is angrier than I’ve ever seen him. He continues his attempts to choke me, lifting me nearly to the surface and slamming me to the sand repeatedly, trying to force the life out of me. I’m not going to let him. I know the rules here. Concentrating, I o
pen a portal directly beneath myself and Benny. A few hundred pounds of seawater and I plummet through the hole and splash all over the floor of the Southside Marina maintenance shop.
Benny looks up from where we’ve landed, partway between two customer boats undergoing repairs. He scowls and scrambles up immediately, searching for some new way to injure me. He moves to Dave’s toolbox, grabs an open end wrench off the top and hurls it at me. I duck and put an arm over my head as the wrench sails past.
“Dude! Cut it out!” I yell. Benny ignores me and chucks a screwdriver. I duck behind the nearest boat engine and keep cover. More tools ricochet off the boat. “This isn’t productive!”
A whirring electric motor whizzes to life on the other side of the boat. I recognize it as the portable angle grinder.
Oh hell no.
I pop up above the level of the boat in time to see Benny advancing on me, the spinning disk of the angle grinder preceding him. I snatch up the nearest things I can find to hurl at him. These include a life vest, a rubber buoy, and a pair of a customer’s boat shoes. These all bounce off Benny and his angle grinder at various velocities, but he continues to advance. It’s only when I snatch up a wooden oar and brandish it in front of me that he finally pauses.
“You want to play?” I ask. “Okay, let’s do this.” I take a swing at Benny with the oar and he retreats, tossing the angle grinder to the floor and fleeing around the bow of the boat to my left. I take another cut at his head, but he ducks and my oar glances off the bow rail. Benny runs for the corner and comes up with an aluminum flag pole as a weapon. He rips a pirate flag off the pole, then spins and swings it at me. I parry the blow with my oar.
“I knew you were going to go back,” Benny yells. “You just won’t stay away from him. It’s just a matter of time till he gets to you. He’ll absorb your mind like the others and then he’ll come for me. There won’t be anywhere to hide.”
Our weapons clatter a few more times as we hack at each other. I retreat between the two boats again, limiting him to a single approach. “You can’t kill me here, man. We’re already dead.”
“If he can do it, then I can too,” Benny declares. “I’ll defeat you, and then I’ll. Take. Your. Mind.” Each word is punctuated with a swing of his flag pole.
My oar begins to splinter.
“I’m not going to let him take my mind,” I say. “Or you. I know what I’m doing now.” I grunt and parry his blows.
“You know nothing!” The flagpole shakes in his hands as he yells. “Have you heard the way they cry in the fog? The way he traps them? He uses their memories. Talks to people in the real world. He’s getting too powerful. You’ve been connecting to one of us in the real world. What happens if he gets into your memories? What if he gets out?”
“What do you know?” I ask. “Do you know what they’re doing? The ones he talks to?”
“I’ve listened. In the fog. They’re going to bring him back. He promises them a new life. New chances.”
“Chances at what?”
“To save themselves from what’s coming.”
I keep my oar up and ready, but it looks like it only has a few more hits left in it. Long cracks radiate down the handle and big chunks of it are missing. Benny sees his advantage and grins. He lifts the flagpole and swings hard. I stagger back under the strike. The oar loses its top, the flat paddle skittering across the shop floor, leaving only a jagged handle. Benny swings again and charges at me. The remnants of my oar disintegrate in my hands and I reel backward, one hand out to brace myself against the rolling shop doors. Benny throws a hand out and changes the scenery so fast that I lose my balance. I’m no longer in the maintenance shop, but back inside my apartment. I crash to the floor amid shards of broken glass in the living room. I grunt from the fall then sit up gingerly. Wind is whistling through the broken window pane in the door.
It takes me a moment to orient myself. The apartment looks as it did the last time I left it. Dark clouds outside. My softball bat resting at the foot of the coffee table. Benny seems thrown off by the changes and the dim light. He glances around the living room, then back to the darkened bedroom hallway.
“What happened here?” His eyes flit to the windows, the black clouds roiling across the sky. The smell of rain on the wind.
“You shouldn’t have brought us here. It’s not safe,” I say, struggling to rise from pile of shards. “He found me.”
Benny’s eyes rest on the softball bat. “How did he—” His voice is cut short by the appearance of a long blade protruding from his chest. He looks down in shock at the end of the shiny knife stabbing through the front of his shirt. The amorphous form of Zurvan oozes from the darkness of the hallway.
“I thought you might come back here.” He steps forward and places his other hand to the top of Benny’s head, cocking it toward him. “So good of you to bring along our scruffy friend.” Benny’s expression jolts from surprised to terrified in an instant. His limbs go rigid and his eyes are wide. “Time to see what makes him tick.” Zurvan tightens his grip on Benny’s skull. Benny throws his hands to the top of his head and mouths a scream, but no sound comes out.
“NO!” I spring forward and charge at Zurvan, aiming to tackle him away from Benny, but Zurvan throws a hand out and changes the scene around himself faster than thought. For a moment he’s standing in desert sand, Benny’s pale face translucent in the sunlight. The sun beams passing through him seem to be taking the substance of his body with them.
And then they’re gone.
I crash into the far wall of my apartment, crunching the plaster, then slump to the floor.
No.
No. No. No.
My body twitches in fear. Shit. He took Benny. He knows this place now. He’ll come back. I struggle to my feet and stagger toward the center of the room, trying to open a portal to somewhere else. Where? Where can I go?
The light shimmers and the portal opens. A dark hole into another time. I feel the presence of Zurvan reenter the room before I even see him. My mind tingles with the energy of his newly expanded mind.
“Going so fast?” His voice is amused.
I turn to the wall where he’s reappeared. He’s grinning. Comfortable. This place is his memory now too.
I dive through the portal and tumble to the ground beyond, closing the window behind me, just as Zurvan gets close.
He knows. He has my life now. Benny’s life.
I get to my feet in the dank underground tunnel. I’m below street level, just another lost soul in the Seattle Underground. This memory is recent. One of my chronothon adventures. An ending of sorts in a strange and lonely timestream. A place Benny could never have come. I stagger a few feet and collapse again, slumping against the dirty wall of the tunnel.
Since the moment I saw my dog in my parents’ old house, I haven’t lost my composure. Not even in the face of all the nothingness I’ve witnessed. Now I’m falling apart again. Seeing Benny wracked with pain. His face. My face. It’s more than I can handle.
I let the sobs out. Fingers clenched in the dust of the tunnel, I shudder and shiver, letting out the emotions I’ve been trying so hard to contain.
The darkness closes in on me. I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want the people I love to be dead. I don’t want other selves and half-lived alternate lives to end any more than I want to lose my own.
Benny is gone. Zurvan is free to roam his past now. He’ll dissect the little bits of memory that make me me. And then what? Will he come for me? Was he taking Benny because he needs to or just because he could use him to get to me? I’ve been foolish to think I could contend with him. Zurvan is stronger. More powerful. He has the upper hand here, controlling the very space I have left to move in.
Huddled in my dark tunnel, I feel cornered.
There is going to be an end to this. I can feel it coming now. My end.
Shivering in the dark tunnel, I let the fear run its course. Let it come, then let it go. My fear is strong, but it’s
not the only instinct I’ve got.
I’m still here, still surviving.
I reach inside my memory, searching for a connection, hoping that the me in the real world might be closer now. Letting myself hope that he’s decided to let me back in again, decided to save me from this place. For a moment I feel something, like he’s here in the darkness alongside me, claustrophobic and worried. But then the feeling vanishes. I grope in the darkness, reaching for the connection again. Anything to tie me to the real world, but if he was there, he’s shut me out, leaving me to face my fears alone.
“Help me.” I whisper my plea to the darkness. I don’t know who is there to hear, but I beg anyway. Somebody. Please.
I don’t know how long I can stay like this. This tunnel is safe for now. Zurvan won’t find me here. But I’m trapped and buried. The tunnel walls are hardly a fortress, but this memory is one of the few that are mine alone. For now I wrap my arms around my knees and resign myself to hiding.
The Neverwhere may linger on the edge of eternity, but it’s an edge I’ve gotten too close to. As Zurvan takes over more and more of this place, I get the feeling that each movement I make is just pushing me closer and closer to the edge.
I’m running out of time.
<><><>
London, UK, 2165
Carson, Tucket, and I are gathered around the combat knife. We’ve gotten as much as we can from Doctor Quickly and Professor Chun about our mission, but the parameters are still a little fuzzy. We need more information about The Eternals if we’re going to rescue Mym, and while every moment of waiting only increases my worry about her safety, I have to rely on our strongest asset—time.
I’m a time traveler now and, if there is a moment anywhere in the future or past when we can save her, I’ll find it. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.
I read off the coordinates from the face of the playing card we were given and Tucket and Carson set their respective devices. I double-check my own chronometer before beginning the countdown.
In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 137
