“There!”
Oelefse paused in a patch of knee-high ropes that fountained silver sparkles from their extremities, like so many eels vomiting enchantment. Coming up behind him, Cody strained for a better view. In the clash and confusion of mutable radiance, it was difficult to isolate any one shape or configuration. Only when his guide pointed it out did the younger man espy the cluster of ilecc. Just as Oelefse had told him, its leaves were an intense cobalt hue that twinkled as if illuminated from within by a million miniscule blue bulbs. Even in the convulsion of color that surrounded them, the several ilecc bushes stood out. Though without Oelefse’s trained eye, Cody doubted he could have found them on his own. Singled out and isolated by his line of sight, they were as spectacular as any of the transcendental growths he and his companion had encountered thus far.
Oelefse retained the lead as they tentatively approached the cluster. Nothing sprang from the surrounding inimical fairyland to lay claim to their souls. Nothing reached forth to tear them asunder. Bending slightly, the older man handed Cody his outré pistol.
“Keep watch.” Reaching into his briefcase, he pulled out a knife that was breathtaking in its ordinariness. Simple handle, single unadorned steel blade. Or was that a line of electricity running along its cutting edge? Before Cody could manage a better look, Oelefse had him peering back the way they had come, watching for—anything that moved toward them, the German cautioned his apprehensive companion. Once he felt confident that the archaeologist was on alert, Oelefse began to prune selected leaves from the largest of the several blue bushes, wielding the knife with a surgeon’s skill. One by one, the excised leaves were placed in a waiting plastic bag. Soon the bag itself began to glow with an incredibly opulent, vivid blue light.
Anxious to return the unfamiliar weapon to its owner, Cody nonetheless did his best to keep a sharp eye on the outlandish, exotic landscape. Despite his resolution, his attention was continually being distracted by shimmering, lazily perambulating perceptions of incomprehensible beauty.
A line of flickering green veils danced across his field of vision, drifting from right to left like dancers in some ethereal slow-motion ballet. Emerald stars twinkled within their slender, diaphanous bodies and they stared at him out of eyes that were wandering bits of comet. Lumps of phosphorescent orange trundled along the ground, living diadems of gold and glistening padparaschah. Everywhere he looked there was light and color and coruscating brilliance, as if he had stepped into a world permanently bathed in cold fire.
Overhead, growths that were not plants shivered with ecstasy beneath the rain of lambent moonbeams. Some moaned softly while others were silent. He felt himself adrift in visual Debussy. Only something like gravity kept him bound to the earth; otherwise he felt certain he would have taken flight, soaring skyward while born aloft on streamers of scintillating aurora.
Alerted by some subtle shift in his companion’s manner, Oelefse glanced up from his work. “Beauty kills,” he reminded Cody curtly. “In this place even daydreaming can be deadly.”
His thoughts wrenched back to reality by his companion’s cool tone, the archaeologist blinked away incipient fantasies. “I’m on it, Oelefse. Tend to your snipping. How much longer?”
“Almost done. Almost have enough.” He resumed his horticultural cropping.
It was a song that finally snared Cody. Not some beauteous wayward shape, not something glistening on the ground that dropped diamonds in its wake, but a melody. A hymn so pure it could only arise from a source immaculate and unsullied. Entranced, he stepped forward, certain that as long as he kept Oelefse in sight neither of them was in any real danger. He had to find the source of that unearthly music.
It hung in the air behind a baobab-shaped organic tower through which lights ran from bottom to top before sparking off into the enchanted sky. In outline the singer was amorphous, a hovering mass of shifting transparent silk some ten feet tall. Within its core, chanting crystals swam like bioluminescent squid on a dark Pacific night. Each emitted a slightly different tune and color. Combined, they melded to create a transcendent harmony that tantalized both ear and mind. A chorus of trained angels could not have generated so euphonious a sound.
Later, he was not sure if he fell into it, or it ate him.
He was suddenly and unexpectedly engulfed. A thickness, rancid and cloying, clogged his nostrils and threatened to fill his throat with mephitic glue. The singing crystals had become small round suckers lined with barbed teeth. They were drifting toward him, opening and closing with a horrid pulsing that suggested the muscular action of unmentionable orifices. Abruptly frantic, he tried to get away, only to find that he could hardly move. He was trapped in something like glistening, transparent gelatin. It severely inhibited his movements and restricted his ability to defend himself. He could not even bring the weapon he still held tightly in one hand to bear on the vicious, degenerate mouth-shapes that were advancing inexorably toward him.
A ringing filled his ears. It was loud and insistent, but not unbearable. He felt himself beginning to torque as the protoplasmic material in which he was embedded responded to the rising whine. There was nothing he could do to stop it. His body curved, then bent in the middle, forcing him to arch backward until he thought his spine would snap. The fanged suckers had ceased their movement toward him and were swirling about in aimless confusion. Still the whine intensified, until it reached a profound level of auditory disturbance. Then the world exploded.
Or rather, the Interloper that had engulfed him did. Coated with clamminess, he found himself sprawled upon the ground. Their internal glow muted, the brilliant singing crystals were crawling away in all directions, seeking shelter in the surrounding scintillating growths. Whenever he blinked, they would change from exquisite crystals to obscenely pulsating fanged suckers, and back again.
Oelefse was standing over him, briefcase in one hand and a most peculiar-looking tuning fork in the other. It was the source of the ascending whine that had disturbed Cody but had proven fatal to the organism that had enveloped him. Abashed, he rose slowly and tried to wipe the clamminess from his exposed skin.
“I’m sorry. It was—it distracted me.”
“The chant of the Acryalaq is lulling, but it is an Interloper like any other.” The older man indicated their fairy-tale surroundings. “In their own dimension, or whatever place this is and however one chooses to label it, they take on a beauty that is as striking as it is false. Here, only our being alien protects us. If we react, or draw too much attention to ourselves, then our intrusion becomes magnified, like the beating of a drum. We become to the Interlopers in their world something like what they become to us in ours.” He held up the tuning fork. It had a visually disorienting shape, as if there were three bars to the fork instead of the usual two. The optic confusion tormented Cody’s eyes.
Oelefse smiled. “People have sketched this little device for years, thinking it no more than an optical illusion. Only the master craftsmen of the Society know how to actually make one. The vibrations can be deadly to Those Who Abide. They are more profoundly affected by sound than by the usual variety of prosaic physical assaults.”
“In Kelli’s hospital room, the rattle and your singing were what drew them out,” Cody remembered.
The older man nodded. “Laughter too has its own distinctive pitch. Why do you think music has traditionally been thought to have medicinal effects? It does! The right sort is intolerable to Interlopers. Among composers, Brian, Bantock, Janacek, Mahler, Tournemeire, Pingold, Beethoven, and a few others have been shown to have particularly therapeutic effects. In Germany, a group called Scorpions often used to hit just the right notes. There are many more.” He continued tolerantly. “So you understand, we are not helpless, not even against that which is to most people invisible.” He looked past the embarrassed archaeologist. “Now we must hurry to leave. The act of your being momentarily fed upon has alerted this place to the actuality of our intrusion.”
“I’m sorry.” Still wiping at himself, Cody hustled along in the other man’s wake. “I don’t feel partly consumed.”
“How about unhappy, downcast, dispirited?”
“Well, yes, but that’s because I acted in such a thoughtless, stupid manner.”
“It is not. It is because you were temporarily affected by the Acryalaq. To feed upon the depression and sorrow of mankind in our world, an Interloper must be swallowed by a human body. To feed upon you here, the Acryalaq must swallow you.”
“What—” Cody gulped hard, “What would have happened to me if your tuning fork hadn’t worked, if you hadn’t been able to rescue me?”
“You would have fallen into a trancelike state of deep despair. Depression, you know, kills more people than most any disease worthy of the name, yet it is still not recognized as such by many doctors. Through dint of perseverance and science, humankind makes progress; a little here, a little there, against Those Who Abide. For the first time, we have medicines that can help us fight off an Interloper infestation. Prozac, for example. Before that, Saint John’s Wort. While these do not affect the physical fabric of the Interloper, they break down its food. Judicious application of such curatives can sometimes starve an Interloper to death. But it is not common, and Those Who Abide slowly develop a resistance to such drugs and herbal extracts. That is why something like Prozac may help a severely depressed person for a while, but not permanently. It is not that the drug fails; it is that the inhabiting Interloper or Interlopers gradually develop a resistance to repeated applications. Music is better. So is laughter. There are beneficial side effects, and both are less invasive. There are better ways to alter the chemical composition of a person’s mind than with heavy doses of immoderate pharmaceuticals.”
Ripples of refulgent elegance bowed in an unfelt breeze as first Oelefse and then the archaeologist leaped over them. Silver radiance trailed from Cody’s feet where they had struck the wheat-high growths. From their midst erupted a flurry of iridescent, silver-winged sylphs that took the shape of orchids with legs.
“But everything here is so beautiful.”
“I know that.” The older man sprang like a wizened hare between two opalescent, sky-scraping spirals; twinned pairs of outgrowths forever entwined in intangible love. “In our world beauty is deceptive. Here it is both deceptive and lethal.”
“But down below (Cody’s brain screamed for direction in this dimension of shimmering sighs and electric silhouettes), the Interlopers I perceive are grotesque distortions of traditional life forms, all teeth and claws and suckers and clutching tentacles.”
“Ah, perception!” Oelefse hurdled a log composed of glistening strands of dew that throbbed like a longitudinal heart. “What you see here is truth, and what you see there is truth. Your eyes tell you true. It is your mind that is confused. Your experiences with perception should have taught you by now: Trust everything that you see, but not how your brain interprets it.”
Cody’s thoughts tightened into a Gordian knot. “I don’t understand.”
“You will, I hope—if you live long enough. And be careful where you wave that pistol.”
With a start, Cody realized he was still clutching the wide-mouthed weapon that Oelefse had used earlier. Gripping it even tighter, he raised it into firing position. He didn’t know if it was armed or loaded; still, it made him feel that he was not entirely helpless, nor completely dependent for his survival on one elderly, somewhat punctilious German. Oelefse continued to hold the now silent tuning fork out in front of him like a sword. It was better than that, Cody knew. Here, a blade was useless, and probably bullets too. Sound was the ammunition they could not afford to extinguish.
His usually reliable sense of direction having long since deserted him (being engulfed whole has that effect on people), he was amenable to following Oelefse’s lead. Certainly, the older man seemed to know where he was going, though the archaeologist felt they were taking an awfully roundabout route back to the stairwell that led to the corridors of Hohensalzburg Castle. Or maybe it was just his aching legs that made him feel that way.
The blue leaves! The cobalt-hued bracts of the ilecc! He had seen Oelefse place them one by one in a plastic bag, but where was . . .?
In the briefcase, you idiot, he told himself. His knowledgable companion would not carry so precious a cargo loose in one hand. Surely the leaves were inside the briefcase. In any event, having run so far from the place where the bushes grew, he was not about to reveal his ignorance by wondering aloud if Oelefse had left them behind. The older man’s mind was full to overflowing, but in the time they had spent together Cody could not remember his guide exhibiting any especial tendency to forgetfulness. Relying as he was on the other man to preserve their lives, Cody had no choice but to trust him in the vital matter of a handful of blue leaves.
They were better off in the German’s possession anyway, the archaeologist mused. At least Oelefse had managed not to get himself eaten.
“We are almost there.” Now the older man’s tone was showing signs of fatigue. They were the words Cody had been waiting to hear. His fears, the ache in his legs, faded noticeably. A quick plunge down the aurora-rimmed aperture and they would be safely back in their own world. True, they still had to confront the alerted Interlopers who dwelled there, but at least his environs would not sway, and moan, and sing songs of vaporous, virulent loveliness. The world might reflect, but it would not glow, and there would be only one moon hanging in the bilious sky.
Oelefse slowed and the archaeologist, who had experienced no difficulty keeping up with the shorter, older man, had to put on the brakes to avoid running right over the top of his guide. Perspiring profusely in the dual moonlight, expensive briefcase grasped tightly in one fist and gleaming metal fork in the other, he looked like a mad piano tuner stalking some fabled feral Steinway.
They stood gasping in the middle of a small meadow composed of transparent shards tinged sapphire and ruby, glistening ankle-high fronds that rustled with a soft, shy radiance. Deeper in the jungle of shimmering impossibilities, the rising tinkle of bells heralded the approach of unseen dynamics as lethal as they were beautiful. The ground began to shake beneath the gathering of forces that were without weight but not devoid of substance.
The stairwell was gone.
In order to cover more ground they separated, but were careful to stay within clear sight of one another. Overhead, the splay of unfamiliar stars assumed an ominous cast, and in the distance something mewled obscenely. From within the density of flickering, glittering growths, small hungry lives looked on expectantly.
Tired and anxious, the two men met on the far side of the coruscant field. “We have to find it.” Oelefse was breathing with some difficulty. For the first time since they had entered the dimensionality of the Interlopers, he looked his age. “It is the only way back.” His gaze was focused on the high, waving fronds of twinkling transparency that surrounded the meadow, and on the sound of tinkling bells that was drawing steadily nearer. “And we have to find it fast. We have become too conspicuous.”
Panting, Cody turned and gestured helplessly. “I’ve been over every foot of ground on my half. There isn’t even a rabbit hole.”
“An apt choice of words, my young friend.” Oelefse started back toward the center of the meadow. “Come—we must look again.”
“Couldn’t we hide in the forest—or whatever this is—until it’s safe to come out?”
His guide shook his head sharply. “There is no place here for us to hide, Cody Westcott. We stink of alternate reality.”
As he followed the other man, the archaeologist kept his gaze on the ground, searching desperately for any suggestion of a hollow or opening. “We’re not exactly defenseless. We have your pistol, and the tuning fork. And we can always fight back with laughter.”
“Have you ever seen a person overwhelmed by deep depression?” Oelefse challenged him. “Terminal melancholy rendered as a solid, motile form instead of a feeling is not a pretty sight. It can prostrate even a professional comedian.” He nodded in the direction of the approaching tintinnabulation. “I do not want to be standing here waiting to greet it when it arrives.”
Watched all the while, they continued their desperate search. If there had ever been a hole in the meadow, it was now gone, swallowed up by circumstance, camouflaged by coincidence.
Camouflaged . . . Edging away from his tall companion, Oelefse pivoted and rushed back to the center of the meadow. As Cody looked on, the elderly German began jumping up and down like a maniac—but a maniac whose mania of the moment was under control, and brought to bear with purpose.
“Here!” Oelefse was shouting excitedly. “Over here, Cody!”
The tinkling, which had grown to clanging, was very near now, as if the meadow was about to be assaulted by an army of runaway church bells. The archaeologist hurried to rejoin his guide. When he arrived, disappointment settled on him like the reek of cheap whiskey. Glittering glassy-grassy, the ground looked the same as every square foot they had previously covered.
“There’s nothing here,” he commented disappointedly.
“There is always something there.” Taking two steps forward, a grimly grinning Oelefse began to jump gingerly up and down. As he did so, the earth beneath him responded like the surface of a too-taut trampoline. Seeing the look on the younger man’s face, he explained, “Some kind of membrane. It formed over the opening while we were searching for the ilecc bush, like a scab over a wound.”
As near as Cody could tell, the surface on which Oelefse was standing was identical to that which surrounded them, right down to the glittering mat of eight-inch-high multihued growths.
“How do you know it’s the entrance?” he asked. “Maybe it’s a lure, like the appendage that grows from the forehead of the anglerfish?” He indicated the spongy covering. “Maybe that’s the opening to a mouth.”
But Oelefse was not listening to him. Instead, he was staring, focused on something beyond the archaeologist’s right shoulder. Cody turned, and beheld the Snark.
How to describe a sense of horror that derives from the sight of overpowering beauty? He was unable to do it. His voice caught in his throat and he could only stare. It loomed above them, pealing like doom, singing a song of shattered desire and overpowering despair. Cody felt himself drawn to it, inclining toward the pulsating mass of jangling lips and bottomless maws, leaning in the direction of a falling-forward that would have seen him ingurgitated like paste, reduced to little more than emotion-bereft human slime.
Something grabbed his left wrist and pulled. Hard.
“Cody—jump! Now!”
He no longer had any control over his body. His neuromuscular system stood paralyzed by the sight and sound of the bells, by their beauty and temptation. It was, he remembered later, akin to optical heroin. The sight would haunt him for the rest of his days.
But it would not consume him. Not today.
Losing his balance, he felt himself yanked backward. Who would have thought to look at Oelefse that there were such reserves of physical strength in that well-preserved but unassuming patrician body? Tuning fork shoved in his pocket, briefcase gripped securely in his left hand, the elderly German had wrenched the much bigger and younger man backward. They tumbled in tandem, falling hard against the very spot where Oelefse had chosen to do his demonstrative bouncing. As they fell, a murderous pealing reached for them. There was a tender, ripping sound, as of a bedsheet splitting down the middle in the distance. Blackness descended.
Cody’s head slammed against something unyielding and did a little bouncing of its own. A different class of stars from those that had pockmarked the heavens of elsewhere filled his vision. Oelefse had landed on his side and was now rolling to a sitting position. It took him a minute to find his flashlight.
It was dead silent, the archaeologist noted, which was a prohibitive improvement on the silence of the dead. As soon as the older man’s light winked to life, Cody’s slowly clearing vision revealed walls of cut stone, the same material that was presently cushioning his backside. It looked familiar, was familiar.
They were back in the chamber, back in Festung Hohensalzburg. Back in their own reality.
Overhead—if one stood precisely in the center of the chamber and listened intently—there was a barely audible, distant clinking of tiny bells. Or it might have been a baffled, frustrated roaring. Cody sensed that his ears were not working too well. A consequence of the blow to the back of his head occasioned by his fall, no doubt.
“How come we can break through the barrier but they can’t?” He was startled at the sound of his own voice in the echoing chamber.
“It is all a matter of relativity, my friend.” Standing straight if not tall, Oelefse was brushing himself off. “Remember, to be active in this world every Interloper needs a host, and to enter a host they must first exist in a vector.” He indicated their cold, comfortingly solid surroundings. “This stonework is uncontaminated, and has stood thus for hundreds of years. Otherwise it would not be possible to make use of such a portal.” Reaching up, he clapped his companion on the back. “Enough sightseeing, ja? We are alive, uninfected, and we have secured the blue leaves of the ilecc. It is time to depart.”
“I’m with you, Oelefse.” Fumbling in a pocket, Cody found and extracted his own flashlight. Together they started off down the corridor. Behind them, distant outrage took the form of a momentary incursion of fetid fairy-dust that rapidly and unobserved evanesced from the chamber.
They emerged at last into the subdued light of a quarter moon, the walls of the fortress buildings towering sentinel-like above them.
“What now?” Around them, all was silent and still. It was too late and they were too high to hear much of the sound of the city below. Somewhere distant, the horn of a Peugeot blared mournfully. It was so hauntingly ordinary, so immediate, that Cody wanted to cry. Had the unknowing driver been within reach, the grateful archaeologist would have hugged him.
“We go down, of course. Back to our nice, comfortable, Interloper-free hotel. Back to reality, although we are back in it now, even if it does support within its walls the weight of ages.” Strength and confidence regained, the elderly German chose a path that would take them toward the main entrance. “We cannot leave by the tourist gate, of course. It will be locked. But there is a small gate that is used by people who work here.” He smiled. “The Society has a key. It leads to a separate path that is negotiable even in the dark. Going down, it will be easy.”
Feeling quietly triumphant, Cody walked effortlessly alongside his guide. They had been to a place where man was not meant to be, and had survived to return. And now they had the makings of a medicine to drive out the horror that continued to abide within his beloved. He was feeling very good.
“What about the night watchman? Won’t he wonder what we’re doing here?”
“What night watchman? When not in use, the fortress is sealed and inaccessible. There is no need for night watchmen within as long as the entrance is patrolled outside.”
“Then who,” the suddenly uneasy archaeologist murmured as he raised a hand and pointed, “is that?”