The light had torn the beginnings of a scream from Jose, but then it winked out, taking his voice and vision with it. For a few minutes, he was convinced he must be permanently blind, and cursed listening to that crazy bitch and her spiel about big gods and little gods and languages that could create and destroy.
But then Jose’s eyes adjusted to a new darkness. The hexagon, the statues, the buildings were all gone. So were his clothes. When he tried sucking in a breath, he felt a small, sharp pain where he’d had a cavity filled a year or so before. It looked like he was in a cavern of immense proportions. Stalactites of glittering stone hung from a ceiling several hundred feet above, some of them as long as buses, while stalagmites reached up for them. Both gave off a faint phosphorescent light, though as he inspected one of the nearby stalagmites, he saw that it was a kind of moss growing on them, and not the rock formations themselves, which glowed. Jose listened for a moment and heard water dripping somewhere ahead and to the right. He heard no voices, though, human or otherwise. Was he alone here? And where, exactly, was “here,” anyway?
He thought of the trapezoids, and of what Kathy had said: “They use the trapezoids to come from somewhere else, some other part of the world, maybe. And they go back to that place.”
Maybe she had been right, crazy or not. Maybe his whole team hadn’t been vaporized, as he’d secretly feared. Maybe they’d just been…moved. He found the thought comforted him a little—the first real inkling of peace since they’d originally discovered the city.
“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.”
He hoped Kathy was right…and found that he could actually get behind her way of thinking. He knew Claire; she was tough, a fighter. She wouldn’t just lie down and give up, not if there was any way of surviving out here. And Rick and Terry, they were smart, resourceful—Claire had hired them for a reason. Jose allowed himself the tiniest cautious hope that he really would find his team again. Maybe, just maybe, he could make up for leaving them behind.
He began walking. He was aware of the parts of him dangling between his legs as he walked, and made a mental note to find something he could use for clothing, if he could. He circled around a grouping of stalagmites and then—carefully, as some of them were sharp and just about balls-height—stepped over some others, heading in the direction of the dripping water. At least, he hoped it was water that was dripping.
His backpack was gone, too, left behind in the city center with his clothes, and he felt surprisingly more vulnerable without the former than the latter. He could have used a snack just then or a drink. He didn’t relish the idea of finding sustenance from any part of this mixed-up world, but realized he might not have a choice.
The cave beyond the rock formations narrowed into branching tunnels, not that such narrowing affected him any. The ceilings were still echoingly high. He chose the one to the left. The dripping water, he hoped, was coming from that direction, and although he knew he couldn’t trust sound or any other sense completely, it was all he had to go on.
It was dark in those tunnels, and he wished again he had a flashlight, even one of those crappy Paragon-issued ones. No glowing moss grew on those walls, although something unpleasantly slippery, too smooth and too cold, did coat them. As he felt his way along, he grimaced at the sensation of the stuff being uprooted by his fingers and sliding across the backs of his hands.
He had walked just long enough to start doubting the direction he’d chosen when he heard the sound of footsteps. They stopped as suddenly as his own. He would have been inclined to chalk it up to echoes except that the faint green glow of the moss illuminated a bend in the path a few feet ahead. And the glow wavered a little. It was moving. Slowly, he crouched, feeling for something he could use as a weapon. His hand closed around a rock and he stood, edging as quietly as he could toward the wall.
After a few minutes of silence, the glow came around the corner.
Jose let out a battle cry made more of fear than bravery and hoisted the rock overhead. He was about to bring it crashing down on the head of the figure in front of him, controlling the glow, when he recognized Kathy. She flinched when she saw him, her hand fluttering up to her chest.
“Oh shit! Oh my God, I’m sorry!” He dropped the rock. “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
She smiled at him. “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay. You just scared a year off my life, but it’s probably one of the old waiting-to-die ones anyway, so it’s okay. How about you?” She was carrying a stick whose tip was wrapped in the glowing moss. It looked to Jose like some kind of alien cotton candy.
“I’m fine, yeah.” Jose knew it was probably rude to check her out, but she was wearing very little and had a nice body. She’d found some yellowish fur pelts and gray strips of hide, it looked like, and had tied a thin one across her breasts. Two others she’d made into a loincloth and thong, bound at her hips with the strips of hide. She’d even managed to fashion crude little fur boots, laced above her ankles. She looked a little like those women on old men’s adventure books and comics.
If she noticed his ogling, she pretended not to. “We ought to get you something to wear,” she said, turning back in the direction she’d come. “Unless you like your junk slapping around in the breeze.”
He remembered then that while she was wearing very little, it was still more than he had on, and he blushed. “Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean, better to put all this away before these greater gods of yours take a look and make me one of them, huh?”
Jose heard her chuckle without turning around. “Sure, you don’t want to embarrass them.”
They turned another corner and emerged into a smaller cave than where Jose had first appeared. In the center of the cave was what looked like a fire pit with a stack of wood sticks. A substance danced and licked at the air above it, and although it gave off no light or heat, Jose assumed it was a kind of fire from its shape and the way it moved. Beyond that was the stack of strange animal pelts and hides. He made his way around the fire to them, playfully calling over his shoulder, “Want to turn around? I’m shy, you know.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him but smiled.
He rooted through the pile of pelts. The furs and the skin under them both felt incredibly soft, and he wondered what animal they’d come from. Some of the hairless hides reminded him of the awning material in the city center. Others, he suspected, came from those terrible faceless things in the library. Those skins had been cut into strips, and although Jose had no desire to touch any part of those monsters, he saw that it was the most efficient way to keep the pelts in place.
“Have you seen anyone else? Hornsby?”
Jose shook his head. “No one yet but you.”
“Yeah, same here.” She glanced around the cave. “If you grab a stick, you can get a tangle of moss from that tunnel over there and make a kind of torch. And I think we should grab one or two of the smaller pelts. Maybe we can make waterskins or little packs to carry stuff.”
“You’re pretty good at this survival thing,” Jose said. “Girl Scout?”
“Gamer,” she said, and winked.
They gathered up three small skins and some strips of hide and managed to make three little pouches. Kathy tied one each around her thighs and Jose tied one to the belt around his waist.
“Ready?” Kathy asked.
“Ready,” Jose said.
She picked up her moss torch and led him down a well-lit tunnel. There, the moss grew along the walls in abundance.
“I thought plant life might mean water, but I haven’t seen any,” Kathy said as Jose made a torch.
“Me either,” he replied. “I thought I heard it, but—well, you know how sound is here.”
She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry, Jose, for dragging you and Hornsby here. I’m used to just leaping into things, and I forget sometimes that certain situations call for a group decision.”
“Kathy, you might be just about the craziest woman I have ever met.” He grinned at her. “But I trust you, crazy or not. You have good instincts. Where you leap, I follow.”
She smiled back. “Thanks.”
Since the tunnel with the moss ended in a thick wall of rock fifty yards or so down, they backtracked again and chose another tunnel. It slanted downward and grew colder, which did not seem conducive to getting the hell out of there, but neither mentioned it. There was really no other way to go, and after a time, the tunnel leveled out and led to another cavern.
They moved through it slowly, navigating the stalagmites and ducking under those stalactites whose fang-tips reached low enough to graze them. Occasionally a chirping sound would echo against the walls and they would keep still, waiting and watching small undulating pathways appear in the moss, but nothing made a move to attack them. It struck Kathy again that Xíonathymia might once have been a beautiful, vibrant world. That so much had been wiped out, likely by the presence of those greater gods, felt like a genuine loss.
The cavern narrowed again into another tunnel, although this one looked like it had been deliberately excavated. Metal beams supported the walls and ceiling, glowing faint blue and providing just enough light for them to see their way. Occasionally, the rocky surfaces between the beams would catch the faint light and cast little shadows to form faces; although those faces watched them closely, almost contemptuously, given their snarling expressions, they didn’t whisper. It was as if Kathy and Jose being there in that part of the world had somehow forced them into grudging silence. Whatever power to manipulate that the faces might have had over them in the city, that power seemed to be gone now.
“They’re watching us,” Jose said.
“I noticed,” Kathy replied. “Just keep moving.”
The tunnel widened and then turned to the left. They followed as it dipped and rose and bore to the left, narrowing and widening, until they turned a corner and the rock gave way to a hallway. It was so much like a standard, human-built American hallway that Kathy and Jose stopped short. It even ended in a rectangular wooden door about six and a half feet high, with a glass doorknob and key plate. In fact, the only thing alien about the scene before them was a single glowing orb, like a swinging lightbulb, hanging from the ceiling in front of the door.
“There’s no chance that door down there is somehow the other gate you found, is there?”
Wide-eyed, Jose shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember.”
Of all the oddities Jose had seen in that world so far, that little reminder of Earth was somehow the worst. It was cruel, in a way—like they were being teased with it, a photograph of water given to a man dying of thirst.
“Could be a trap,” he said after a time. “What do you think?”
“Could be,” Kathy said, “or it could be a way out.”
“Why does it look like one of our doors? How could it?”
“I don’t know,” Kathy replied. “Maybe it looks however the person looking at it imagines it should look. Let’s go check it out.”
Jose followed her to the door. Upon up-close inspection, it certainly looked like a regular door to him, a single-panel pine interior door with a tarnished metal key plate and a polished glass knob. It even had mundane, human-made hinges, also of tarnished metal.
“We should open it,” Kathy said, staring at the knob.
“Wait.” Jose got down on the cold ground and tried to peer under. He couldn’t see anything but more ground. He pulled himself up into a crouch and peered through the keyhole. Another strikeout – he saw only darkness.
“Anything?” she asked as he stood.
“Nope. Can’t see a damn thing. You might as well open it. There’s no other direction to go, right?”
“Right,” she agreed.
Since he’d met Kathy Ryan back at Warner’s house, she’d seemed to him either incredibly brave or incredibly reckless. She’d only ever seemed scared about discovering the true identity of the planet, and even that, she managed pretty well. She hesitated now, though, her hand reaching with maddening slowness, with reluctance, toward the doorknob. She was scared of whatever was on the other side of that door, and that made him scared, too. He had told her the truth about his trusting her instincts, so if she was worried—a woman who swallowed the knowledge of malignant greater gods for breakfast and then got on with her day—then he figured he ought to be damn well terrified.
She grasped the knob, turned it, and pushed open the door.
* * * *
Before Carl could ask Claire about the Wraiths, he heard a sound like glass breaking. It was them.
He glanced around the room, trying to keep his cool. He couldn’t see anything but the half-changed room—the far side across from the statue had dropped away into deep space, glittering with a mix of those black light stars and blazing white ones, swirling nebulae in rainbow hues and faraway planets. A single thin platform of wood about four feet in width ran from the center of the stage’s bottom step in a convoluted zig-zag across that endless space, down into the depths and up against, winding up and around again, and eventually arriving at a small wooden door in a jagged portion of sheetrock wall fifty or sixty yards across from the statue.
Behind the statue rose more stone pillars floating unevenly, their chains likewise connected to the creature’s neck. On the stage at the base of the statue were five exceedingly large chairs set in a semi-circle facing outward.
“This is bad,” Claire said. She was shaking badly, her gaze darting from the five chairs to the door across from them. “This is very bad.”
“What’s happening?” Carl asked.
“This is the room under the room, at the edge of the world. The Wraiths aren’t the only ones coming.”
She flinched and covered her ears as another glassy shriek tore across their little section of the cosmos. Carl could see them now, the Wraiths. They were pale gray slips of outline, a line of hovering ghosts following the ramps across the stars. They were making their way toward the statue, their voices like hundreds of glass things tinkling and splintering.
And then there was a groaning behind him, the sound a building might make upon waking up and stretching its legs. His heart pounding, he grabbed Claire and pulled her to him to protect her from whatever had made that sound, but she pulled away and ran as he turned in its direction.
He had suspected it would be the giant statue moving, but that made it no less terrible to see. Its head twisted from side to side as if it was working the kinks out of its neck and torso. It stretched its legs like stiff fingers against the stage. The myriad surfaces of the head blurred and stretched, splitting open to form a collection of mouths which in turn swam and stretched and melded with each other to form bigger mouths, then split apart again and swam on.
Beneath the behemoth creature, Claire cowered between its legs, covering her ears and squeezing her eyes tightly shut.
The Void had awakened, and the Wraiths had come. Carl thought again about Alison.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said to her, hoping somehow she could hear. “I’m sorry. I tried to come home to you.” He turned back to the edge of the stage and looked down into the endless galaxies sprawling out below him. He wondered if it would hurt, jumping into that chaos. Would he freeze to death? Asphyxiate? Would he implode from pressure changes? However he died, it was preferable to being torn apart by all those hungry mouths or forced to mutate into a quivering, malformed monster by the greater gods of a world that had forgotten more than Earth might ever know.
A heavy grating sound, neither thunderous like the Void nor high-pitched and crystalline like the Wraiths, drew his attention across the chasm to the little wooden door. It was moving, swinging inward, and through it emerged two figures.
Oh my God, Carl thought. They made it!
“Kathy! Jose!” he shouted as loudly as he could. For several moments, their astonished gazes were fixed on the Void, and on the swirling slips of silhouette in a frenzied rush toward it. He called again and finally they turned their heads in his direction, their eyes lighting up in recognition.
“Carl!” Jose called. “You okay?”
“Yeah!” he shouted back. “I found Claire!”
“What?” Jose cupped his hand around his ear.
“I…found…Claire!” he called.
Jose’s expression rippled with a number of emotions, not the least of which was relief. “Where? Where is she?”
Carl pointed toward the legs of the Void, where Claire, unharmed, had taken to hugging herself tightly.
“Claire!” Jose shouted. “Claire!”
She couldn’t hear him. Carl knew the best chance for both of them was getting to Kathy and Jose and that door.
“Whatever happens, Alison,” he said under his breath, beneath the din of the Wraiths, “I love you, and I’ll find you wherever and whatever Heaven really is.” Then he turned and ran for Claire.
* * * *
Kathy watched in mute horror and fascination as Carl Hornsby ran across the ebony stage toward the mammoth creature that looked like a virus. A blonde woman swathed in a flimsy white fabric shivered and hugged herself beneath it. It reminded Kathy a little of those disaster videos where people were told to brace themselves in doorways during storms. She had never understood the wisdom or seen the safety in such an action, nor did she understand now why the woman was giving Hornsby such a hard time about dragging her out from under the creature. Finally, he must have mentioned Jose; he pointed in their direction and the woman stopped struggling and looked. Jose waved and, apparently in shock, she offered a dazed wave in return. It was then that she let Hornsby tug her by the arm out from under the legs of the beast and toward the stairs. The wooden ramps connecting the stage to the platform on which they currently stood were narrow, and it was impossible to tell how soundly they were put together. She hoped they’d make it.
Already, the first of the Wraiths had reached the stage, and from the shattering sounds it was making, Kathy thought it might have spotted Hornsby and was signaling the others. The shining black creature with the multiple mouths was lifting its legs and crashing them down on the stage; Kathy didn’t think it was meant as a hostile movement against Hornsby and Claire, but rather the impatient stamping of a hungry, agitated animal. That didn’t make those spiky legs, easily eight feet per jointed segment and bristling with thorny protrusions, any less dangerous to the two on the other side.
“I should go help,” Jose said, and started for the ramp.
Kathy reached out and grabbed his arm. “We don’t know how stable those ramps are. If we go running, we can shake them loose and send them tumbling down to”—she looked down into a twirling galaxy coasting by— “to that. Plus, you’ll draw more attention to Claire and Hornsby. That thing doesn’t seem aware of them just yet.”
“I think the Wraiths are. I can’t leave her there. I can’t leave her again,” Jose said, his eyes and voice pleading.
“We won’t. We’re not going anywhere without her or Hornsby,” she said. “We’re going to keep the Wraiths distracted, and that thing, too, if we have to, so they can get across.”
“And how’re we gonna do that?” he asked.
“Give me a minute. I’m thinking,” she said.
He shook his head. “You really are certifiably crazy, you know that?”
She smiled wryly. “Hell yes, I know that.”
He smiled back. “Okay then. Leap away, crazy lady.”