“So, the Wraiths…are they these gods?” Hornsby asked. He was watching the trapezoids carefully now as if he expected them to belch out new horrors.
“No, I don’t think so. Lesser gods, maybe,” Kathy replied, her own gaze drawn to the trapezoids, “but nothing I’ve seen of them so far is consistent with our information about the greater gods.” It wasn’t lost on her that the Wraiths likely hadn’t gone anywhere, only gone quiet. Hornsby had suggested that they were praying, and it made a lot more sense now in context.
“But they’re still dangerous,” Hornsby added.
“Apparently, even this world’s equivalent of rats in abandoned buildings are dangerous,” Jose said.
“I was raised to believe there was only one God,” Hornsby said, a little sadly. He shook his head. “One God who created everything. A loving God.”
Kathy softened a little. Part of her job was supposed to be to shield people from the bigger picture, to maintain faith in the security of the world where she could. She could tell that she had shaken a core foundation in Hornsby’s character—probably in Jose’s as well.
“None of this means that the God you believe in isn’t out there,” Kathy said, giving him a reassuring pat on the arm. “If anything, all of it means it’s more likely that He is.”
“Maybe,” Hornsby said. “But He isn’t here—not on this world, in this universe. Not here.”
Kathy was trying to think of a response when a glassy squeal made them all jump. The air changed again, charged with a crackling electricity. The face-whispering started again, and out there in the open, Kathy could see subtle alterations in the surfaces of the stone-paved ground and the building fronts. This time, the faces that formed had moving mouths and wild, sightless eyes, and their whispering was both ecstatic and terrified.
The Wraiths had awakened from whatever prayer or sleep or meditation they had been engaged in. Ripples of movement in the air gave Kathy and the others glimpses of form, partial silhouettes in muted hues of gray as they swirled and danced overhead within the hexagon.
Then the Wraiths began to sing. To Kathy, it sounded like the music made from the rims of crystal wine glasses, and Kathy found herself compelled to move closer to the edge of the hexagon. A moment later, Hornsby and Jose appeared on either side of her, caught up in the hypnotism of the music as well.
It took some effort for Kathy to break the spell of the singing and reclaim her own thoughts. In a dazed and vacant voice, she pushed through. “They use the trapezoids to come from somewhere else…some other part of the world, maybe. And they go back to that place. I’d bet that Claire, Rick, and Terry, if they’re still alive, aren’t here in this city. They’re wherever the Wraiths go when the trapezoids are activated.”
“Maybe,” Jose said.
“What they left behind…maybe the Wraiths consider those things superfluous, or maybe they can’t be transmitted through those portals,” Kathy murmured, still more to herself than Jose and Hornsby. To them, she said, “We need to know where those trapezoids go.”
Jose cast her a sidelong glance. “Sure, sure I’ll ask. Hey, creepy Wraith things? We know you’re busy and all, flying around making weird noises and sending faces to fuck with us, but when you find the time, do you think we could hitch a ride with you to, I dunno, wherever creepy Wraith things go when they’re not here?”
One of the rippling forms broke from the blurry whirlwind above them and stopped in front of Jose. It spoke a single word to him in that unknowable glass language. Jose tensed. It seemed to be waiting for an answer from him.
“Jose, try to talk to it,” Kathy said in a hushed voice.
“What?” Jose’s head snapped in her direction. “I was kidding, I—”
Another sound came from the rippling figure, a kind of shattering sound which might have indicated impatience.
“What do I say?” Jose whispered.
“Ask them if your team is alive. Tell them we want to bring Claire and Rick and Terry home.”
Behind the form, the trapezoids began to glow. The whispering intensified.
Jose opened his mouth to speak but couldn’t. He might have been thinking about Terry’s coronary stint or the runes in the library book they’d found. Likely, he was thinking of Claire.
The figure rippled again, made a streaking sound, and flew back to join the others.
“I’m sorry,” Jose said, exhaling a shaky breath. “I’m sorry, I just froze. I couldn’t…I kept thinking about Claire, and…”
“It’s okay,” Kathy said, and gave him a gentle squeeze on the shoulder. “It’s okay.”
Before them, the Wraiths had slowed their movements. The trapezoids began to hum and each of the rippling, barely visible figures returned to one of them.
“Come on,” Kathy said, and tugged Jose and Hornsby out into the hexagon.
“Kathy, I don’t think—” Jose’s words were cut off by the light pouring from the trapezoids. It grew blindingly bright, engulfing them until there was nothing but the dazzling whiteness of it.
Kathy made her best guess at the direction of one of the statues. She closed her eyes against the glare but it was no use—the light penetrated her eyelids, filling her, swallowing her, moving her along…
When the light went out, the sudden darkness dropped her to her knees, breathless and confused. It took several minutes for her eyes to adjust again, and when she did, she gasped.
She was no longer in the city center, but in some kind of cave. A lightless fire crackled with burgundy flames, offering no heat. Beyond it was a pile of what looked like fur pelts and hides.
Kathy herself was naked. And she was alone.
* * * *
Carl Hornsby opened his eyes, but saw nothing.
“Hello? Kathy? Jose?”
No one answered.
By degrees, the totality of the void around him faded, and shapes pressed through into his vision. He blinked until he could see, albeit weakly, in the gloom of…of some kind of chamber. He felt cold, and realized that his clothing was gone. His paunch, the seat of his gut instinct, hung over his bare feet, and he patted it, processing the situation.
The transportation to another place through the trapezoids had apparently worked. He had been pulled through, at least the organic parts of him. His contacts, he realized, hadn’t made the trip. That was why everything was a little blurry. That was okay, though. What he needed to keep breathing and thinking and walking and screwing—all those parts had come along just fine.
The first thing to do was to figure out where he was, and then hopefully find the others. He stumbled forward in the dark, aware that he probably should have been more scared than he actually felt. He wasn’t, though, not really. The air in the chamber had a rose-like smell, a little like a perfume his wife wore, and it offered a sense of serenity he hadn’t felt in a long time…if ever at all. Carl didn’t think he’d ever met a serene cop, not even those working the 12 Steps, where serenity to accept the things they could not change was a kind of mantra. Well, except maybe Darryl Lefine—Lefine was about as serene as a man got.
Remembering his partner suddenly like that made him sad. Lefine would have been fascinated by this other world, and probably far more useful to Kathy and Jose than he was. Lefine was scrupulous with details, brilliant with connections…he was a great detective, and a great man.
Well, he had been, before. He was probably dead now, though who knew what that even meant anymore? Carl had never considered himself a religious man, but his mom was a die-hard, church-going Roman Catholic, and his uncle had been a priest. He’d been raised to respect the religion even if he wasn’t the practicing sort, and until he’d been forced through a gateway into another world, he hadn’t realized how much those tenets of religion had formed the foundation of his whole sense of the universe. His views had been so narrow, despite his willingness to believe in aliens and ESP and chemtrails and government cover-ups and everything else. To entertain the thought of those things was fun. It made the world interesting. But to see proof that the reality of everything was so much more complex than he could ever have imagined…it was overwhelming.
What did other worlds and other gods imply about an afterlife? Were there places to go after somebody died, and if so, were they just other worlds in other dimensions beyond our knowledge?
Worse, if scientists now could break into one other dimension, what would stop them from breaking into others? And what would happen if they broke into Heaven…or Hell? Didn’t gates work both ways?
Maybe there were no atheists in foxholes, but who was he supposed to pray to in a universe ruled by other gods? Could his God even hear him? And if he died there in Hesychia or Xíonathymia or whatever the hell this world was called, where would his spirit go then?
It was more than his brain and his gut together could process, and it made his chest tight. He had to pull it together, get back to finding Kathy and Jose. His objective had to remain in the forefront of his thoughts—he had to get back home. He missed his wife. With effort, he had managed to keep her from his thoughts, because the idea of never seeing her again was more than he could handle. She had to be sick with worry, and he couldn’t do anything about it. She was probably scared to be spending nights alone, had probably called the precinct enough times to drive his captain crazy.
She cared. She loved him, and he loved her. She was the perspective he needed, the only perspective that mattered. However small a piece of the bigger picture it was, however insignificant it might seem in the grand scheme of multiple universes, his life with Alison meant everything to him, and wasn’t significance really defined by who loved you? For Alison, he wanted to make it home.
He took inventory of the room around him, blinking and squinting to try to get a better look. He was standing in the center of a large chamber which might have been a bedroom or living room, an assumption based on the uncharacteristically comfortable appearance of the objects in the room. Against the corner of the wall across from him was a large rectangular object draped in gigantic pelts whose silvery fur looked fluffy. Behind the rectangle where the two walls met hung a large burgundy cloth, shiny like silk. The room was warmly bright, almost cheery, but there was no visible light source. Aesthetically, it was a lovely room to look at. Practically, he thought if he could find a way to cut or rip a piece of fabric off of one of the objects, he could at least cover himself up. That was a start.
The only other item of furniture in the room was a piece of wood shaped like a slanted waterfall whose purpose was lost on Carl. As for other wall decorations, there was one. It drew Carl’s attention for the sheer strangeness of it. He made his way over to it and gazed up.
The object hanging on the wall looked to be a sculpture of some kind, although Carl couldn’t begin to guess what it was meant to represent. The thin plate of metal in the background was shaped like a Rorschach inkblot test, vaguely bird- or bat-like. Extending from the top just under the arc of the “wings” were two curving tentacle-like things with smaller tendrils branching off beneath, curling and waving in different directions. The main tentacles curved upward like the arms of those statues in the city center and wrapped around the hilt of a downturned dagger with three curved blades. The tentacles appeared to be made of some kind of clay, but the dagger blades and handle looked like glass tinted white. Carl supposed it could have been a coat of arms of some kind, but if so, it told him nothing he could understand about the family bearing it.
The longer he stared at it, the more it seemed to waver a little beneath his gaze. He blinked a few times and turned away. Nothing here was safe even just to look at—not for long, anyway. He shook it off. He had more important concerns, anyway, than alien art. He needed to find a door, for starters. The room didn’t seem to have one.
What he had initially taken for an essentially box-shaped room he saw now to be somewhat round. There were no corners and nothing like the giant archways he’d seen all over the city. There were no windows, either. Unless people materialized through the walls, he couldn’t see how anyone came or went.
As he scanned the place again, looking for other things he might have missed, he noticed an oblong box with an odd clasp keeping it closed. It looked to Carl like some kind of trunk, large by Earth-trunk standards, but tiny in comparative scale to everything else he’d seen. It was about six or seven feet long by four feet wide and high. Just big enough, he thought, to hold a human being.
He moved with caution toward the trunk, watching it the whole time to see if it would change somehow. Part of him was convinced it would spring open and this world’s equivalent of clothing moths would come flying out and devour him like an Angora sweater.
When he’d gotten to within five feet of the trunk, it jerked, rocking a little. Carl flinched.
“Dammit, I knew it! I knew it,” he said to himself. “This fucking place.”
Still, he couldn’t help creeping closer again. He could hear the occasional thump from the inside, but nothing violent enough to move it again. When he reached the clasp, it fell loose and the lid sprang open. He sucked in a breath, bracing himself for whatever might come flying out. He ticked the seconds off in his head…but nothing happened.
He peered in, then turned away with a sad shake of the head.
Two male human corpses lay in the box. The lower right leg of one was missing, but otherwise, the bodies were fully intact. In fact, they were more than intact; there was an abundance of extra bones that shouldn’t have been there. They protruded from the desiccated skin, fused to the corpses’ hands and forearms, ribs, and skulls. They didn’t look like human bones. Carl couldn’t tell for sure, but they didn’t look like animal bones, either. Carl thought they might very well be the sort of thing that would cause Paragon readouts of blue lines instead of green.
No human could have survived those kinds of alterations without pain along with the hideous disfigurement. If the corpses were part of Jose’s Green Team, then it was probably a blessing for them to be dead. Still, he didn’t look forward to having to break the news to Jose. The researcher seemed like a decent enough guy, and Carl knew what it felt like to lose colleagues to violent and unfair circumstances.
He was about to turn away when one of them groaned. He looked down into the trunk again and saw one of the corpses try to lift its head, the shriveled eyes in their sockets straining to look up at him. The bottom jaw dropped to speak, but it only managed another moan.
“Oh my God.” Carl could only gaze in horror at the pitiful things that had once been men. How had that happened to them, and why? And what the hell was still keeping them alive?
“Ki…ki…” the corpse-man begged from the trunk. “Ki uh. Ki uh.” What was he trying to say?
Carl returned to the edge of the trunk. The mutated arm with its extra claw bones shook as it reached for him. “Kill…uz,” it managed. “Please.”
“I…I can’t…I…” Carl looked around for something he could use to put the two out of their misery, but saw nothing at hand. “There’s nothing here I can use. I’m sorry.”
“Kill…kill…”
Carl considered his options a moment, swallowed his reservations, and climbed into the box. He put his arms around the neck of the one who had reached for him. The flesh felt like old, dry paper, and it flaked and crumbled under his touch. His fingers sank to the bone. The shriveled eyes jerked in the skull as they tried to look at him, and Carl’s skin crawled. He put all his strength into snapping the neck bones. He heard a little pop and thought the job was done, but the bottom jaw kept working up and down, making those awful syllables that tried to be words.
Carl winced. He didn’t understand how the neck bones crumbled beneath his fingers but the jaw and eyes kept working, begging him. A part of him detached from himself, while the seeing and feeling parts took over. There was no other thought in his mind except to make that monstrosity stop moving. Carl rose, revulsion driving him now. He lifted his bare foot and brought it down hard on the thing’s head. The skull caved and his heel went straight down into something warm and mushy. He retched, lifted his foot, and brought it down again and again and again until finally the body stopped twitching and the reaching arm fell back. There was nothing left of the shriveled eyes or the jaw to move now. He turned to the other body and did the same thing.
Carl climbed out of the trunk, dragging his foot along the floor to wipe off as much of the corpses’ brains as he could, then stumbled a few feet and threw up on the floor. He flushed hot and for a moment, he thought he might keel over and pass out right into his puddle of vomit.
Leaning over, his hands on his knees, he sucked in lungfuls of air until the heat faded and the sweat on him cooled. Then he backed away from both the trunk and the vomit, intent on finding something to wrap around his naked body and a door to get the hell out of there.
The room had changed again. It had grown somewhat darker and several degrees colder, he noticed with a whole-body shiver. The rectangular piece of furniture covered in pelts was gone, and so was the wooden waterfall that had stood opposite it. In the space between, there now stood a large statue of polished black stone, a figure of monstrous proportions. Lefine had once shown him pictures of bacteriophage viruses under a microscope—he was always reading science articles and showing Carl the strange ones—and the creature the statue represented looked a lot like one of those. It had a bulbous head, what Lefine had called an icosahedron, like a twenty-sided die, that was both hairless and faceless. Its torso was narrow, braided or twisted, and armless, and it sat on a tripod of spider leg-like appendages which held it up. In between the legs were other smaller tendrils, carved to look like they were waving, and on the end of each was a reptilian type of eye.
The statue stood on a stage between two massive stone pillars, with a chain leading from the top of each pillar to the “neck” area of the statue. Steps leading up to the stage were flanked on both sides by large stone bowls of a burgundy substance which looked and moved like fire but gave off no light.
The stage and the statue took up most of the chamber. Down where Carl stood, the trunk was gone. To Carl’s surprise and unease, even the floor looked gone; he could feel a smooth, cold surface under his feet but saw nothing but black. His vomit was gone as well. There was nowhere else to go but up the steps.
Carl took a deep breath and climbed the first step, then the second. He felt his nakedness acutely, like he was on display. His legs felt heavy as he mounted the next step, and the next. There were twenty of them; he counted as he made his way up. When he finally reached the platform, he saw piles of fabric at the bases of the two pillars. Keeping his eye on the statue, he moved to one of the piles and found a few pieces of fabric to gird himself with. That made him feel a little better. When he turned back to face the statue, he saw the woman.
She was lying on her side directly beneath the body of the statue, the creature’s legs surrounding her like thin bars of a cage. Since she had her back to him, he couldn’t see her face, but he could see short blond hair and a drape of white fabric over her body. He tensed. She had been a blue line, too, and just because he couldn’t see any obvious mutations didn’t mean there weren’t any. She was breathing, though—he could see the side of her chest rising and falling—so he had to go check on her. He jogged over to the legs of the statue and passed between them to its underside. It was warmer there, and Carl’s gut logged the information, but his head pushed it away for the time being. He knelt beside the woman and turned her over onto her back.
Despite a few bruises, she had a natural kind of prettiness that reminded Carl of the farm girls and cheerleaders he’d grown up with in rural Pennsylvania. She had eased into her mid-thirties without losing that perky look of both, a combination of soft and athletic, of innocent and teasing. Seeing her made him think of Alison again.
Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open, but when Carl gently shook her shoulder, she stirred, blinked a few times, and opened her eyes.
When she fully regained her senses, she jumped and pulled back sharply from Carl. “Who...who are you?” she asked. Her voice was raspy and suspicious, nothing like the little girl’s face it came from.
“I’m Carl Hornsby,” he replied in his gentle-cop voice. “I’m a police officer, ma’am. I’ve come with a small team of people to find you and bring you home.”
She blinked as if having trouble comprehending his words. “Paragon sent you?”
He stifled the sarcasm in his reply. “They made a compelling argument for us to come.”
“Who? Who did they send?”
“Well, there’s me, ma’am, and a consultant, Kathy Ryan, who has a lot of experience with, you know, other dimensions and stuff. We had a military man with us, but…” he saw from her expression that he didn’t need to explain further about Markham. “And one of your team members, who managed to find a way out of this place once before. Jose Rodriguez.”
The suspicious scowl on her face dissipated. “Jose? He’s okay? He’s here?”
“Yes, yes, and yes, the last time I saw him.”
“Where…where are Jose and the lady—”
“Kathy,” Carl offered.
“Where are they now?”
Carl regarded her sheepishly. “They came with me through the trapezoid, but…we got separated.”
The woman nodded. She was shivering and clutching the thin white fabric, which Carl could see she had wrapped around her like a goddess in a myth. “They killed them,” she whispered. “Terry, Rick…they did things to change them and then they killed them. They…changed me, too, but it was different. They killed Rick and Terry.”
“Who?” Carl asked in that same gentle, soothing voice. “Who killed your team members?”
She stared blankly at Carl for a moment, and then said, “We have to get out of here. They could come back…This room changes…” She tried to stand, faltered, then tried again.
Carl stood, too. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, let’s go. Let’s find the others, huh? Kathy and Jose?”
“Jose,” she repeated. “Yes.” She let him take her arm and usher out from under the statue.
“Do you know how to get out of this room?”
“There’s only one door,” she said.
“Right, right. I need you to show me where the door is, Ms. Banks.”
“Claire. Call me Claire.”
“Okay, Claire. Can you show me where the door is?” Carl led her gently toward the stairs.
“It’s not in this version, not often. We usually have to wait until it changes again.”
“Okay, we can do that. We just need to hang tight for a while then, right?”
“This version…this is the killing room.” She hesitated at the top of the stairs.
“Oh?”
Claire glanced back at the statue and then met Carl’s gaze. “The Wraiths are afraid of the Void. When I was under the Void, they left me alone.”
“The Void…Do you mean…that statue there?”
“It’s not always a statue. Just like the room isn’t always a room.”
Carl looked up at the thing again, looming over them, a purer black than darkness. It remained completely motionless, but if Claire was right and not delirious or delusional, it wouldn’t stay that way. He turned back to her.
“Are you afraid of the Void?”
She looked away, into the gloom behind him. “I was a scientist once,” she said with a wistful, faraway smile.
“I’ve heard,” Carl said. “A good one.”
“Now I’m afraid…of everything.”
“It’s okay to be afraid in this place,” Carl said. “There’s a lot to be scared of.”
She leaned closer to him and whispered in his ear. Her breath was surprisingly cold. “The Void is a devourer of worlds. It doesn’t think; it just eats. It eats. And it’s waking up now.”
Carl glanced again at the statue. So far as he could tell, it remained mute, unmoving. “How do you know?” he asked.
She pulled back a little and smiled to herself. “Because the Wraiths are coming to feed it.”