The drizzle had turned to sleet, making the footing treacherous, and by midday they all picked their way with care because they had no choice, the sun a dull halo through gray clouds. Jonathan felt hollowed out and numb.
Each new glimpse of the monster gave them fresh nightmare fuel, even as their panic had been dulled by weather and exhaustion. Trundling along, at times the thing emitted a foul green steam from an aperture at what would have been the back of the head had it remained bipedal, as if it were the blow hole of a breaching whale. The sheer number of mumbling and snuffling and burbling and chewing sounds that came from the beast, at a volume they could hear even from above, curdled Jonathan’s blood.
The monster was also honking and ballyhooing at them as if in some grotesque parody of greeting. The monster had no fear of avalanche, and Jonathan prayed hard it might be swept away by a collapsing layer of unstable snow before it reached them.
In theory, the way station was just above them, but they’d yet to catch a glimpse of it.
“Faster! Faster!” Mamoud, shouting from the head of their frantic procession. Jonathan couldn’t stop thinking of the disappearing funeral mourners.
But Rack couldn’t go faster. Neither could Alice. Jonathan could have outstripped them all, Mamoud included, but he wouldn’t, couldn’t leave them. Besides, it wasn’t much different from being charged by a bear—the bear would always be faster in the end. Climb a tree? Good luck with that.
Yet there came a bend around which there wasn’t another bend, and that’s where Rack and Jonathan caught up.
A sharp shelf of rock jutting out to the left, and to the right, almost too close, the steep peak, snow-wreathed and tree-dotted in places with mottled blotches of raw gray stone.
The path ended in a huge stone staircase with a large rounded glass pod at the base. What looked like two sets of train tracks ran up the stairs. At the top, the tracks disappeared into a dark archway leading straight through the mountain. COELECANTH INC. had been etched into the stone at the top of the archway, and a symbol Jonathan had seen back in the mansion made decorative down both sides: >o >o >o
“What in the hell is that? A deranged ski lift?”
“A funicular,” Rack said.
“A what?”
“A funicular,” Rack repeated, and then in an increasingly agitated and ever-louder voice: “An inclined plane or cliff railway—a cable railway—in which a cable is attached to a pair of tramlike vehicles on rails moving them up and down a steep slope, the ascending and descending vehicles counterbalancing each other. Funiculars have existed for hundreds of years and continue to be used for moving both passengers and goods. The name comes from the Latin word funiculus, the diminutive of funis, which translates as ‘rope.’ In olden days—”
“All right—that’s enough! Enough!” Somehow, the outpouring was unbearable in that moment. Jonathan shook Rack, said, “Snap out of it. Snap out of it. You’re panicking.”
Rack shuddered. “Sorry. Sorry. Tested on it at Poxforth. Sorry. I don’t know where my head’s at.”
Alice had already gone ahead to the little boxy control shed next to the funicular and had popped inside, examining something.
Mamoud looked back at them. “Alice is familiar with the mechanism. Let’s hope it’s in working order. On the other side of the mountain is the way station. We’re very close.”
“Funiculars—not much fun,” Rack said. “Can’t rush a funicular, either. It’ll go at the same pace up through the mountain whether we’re being chased by a monster or by a giant tortoise stuck in molasses.”
Over by the control box, Alice was cursing.
“It’s not working—ancient and a mess. But I think I can fix it,” she called out. But how? How did she know? It irked Jonathan this nagged at him, snagged him, made him think he might actually be in panic mode.
“The ledge looks over the trail below,” Jonathan said. “I can see how much time we’ve got. Hold my legs, Rack?”
“That’s what he said,” Rack replied weakly, expression still terror-struck.
Jonathan slapped him on the back. “Just promise you’ll hold on tight. I’m not interested in being that thing’s snack.”
Rack nodded, clearly glad to have something to do.
Feet held by Rack in an achingly tight grip, Jonathan inched out on the ledge far enough to look down, suppressing nausea.
At least it didn’t take much effort to find the monster. It was immediately below, snuffling along the trail. Quietly, he looked through his binoculars.
Oh dear.
Was it a bad sign that the monster hardly bothered to maintain its disguise now? Yes, yes it was. As if they weren’t worth the effort.
“What do you see?” Rack whispered.
“Oh, nothing much. Just a god-awful monster.”
What Jonathan could only call the “flaps” that came to a zippered join at the top of its head at times untethered free to the four points of the compass as it jogged on with a sure-footedness surely preternatural. The startling pink and gray of the maw thus revealed was matched by the revelation of the rows and rows of teeth of various sizes and edges, from serrated to smooth. Matching these teeth were the claws on its “hands,” the fingers of which flopped with the claws on nubs on the palms, the effect as if someone had glued human hands on top of a possum’s feet.
Rack had been whispering, “What, Jonathan? What? What did you say?” for longer than was polite.
“It’s there, but still three loops down,” he whispered back over his shoulder. Thanking any god who might be listening once again that the trail makers hadn’t just etched a staircase leading straight up.
Mamoud had joined them. “Is it slowing down?” he asked.
“It appears to be scenting at the moment. So, yes, it’s moving very slow. I think it’s enjoying this.”
“I don’t care if it’s enjoying this,” Rack hissed.
Indeed, the monster had stopped to sniff and wander back and forth across the trail. What was it looking for? Didn’t it already have their scent? But the next moment was more ominous.
“Oh no,” Jonathan said, felt like someone had just sucked all the air out of his lungs.
“What is it?” Mamoud and Rack said at the same time.
He’d hardly believed it at first, but the creature had stopped sniffing with whatever or wherever its nose might lurk and stared straight up at Jonathan.
“I think it’s seen me.”
“What’s it doing?” Mamoud asked, Rack reduced to quiet cursing, the grip on Jonathan’s legs viselike.
“Looking up in my direction!”
“Stay perfectly still,” Mamoud said.
“I’m frozen with fear, so that’s not a problem.”
“Now what is it doing?”
“The same thing.”
“… how about now?”
“Similar.” Shut up.
“Keep still.”
“Already was doing. As I said. As you can see.”
“Stiller.”
“There’s no stiller than the still I’ve always been.” Through clenched teeth.
“So … now what’s it doing?”
Oh for the love of … but it was doing something different now.
“Mouthing words?”
“Words?”
Yes, words, hissing them out: “I jest tawk wont. Tawk wont.”
Jonathan was no lip-reader, but for some strange reason, as if the monster had made it possible, he knew what it meant: “I just want to talk. Just talk.”
“Naw eato.”
“No, no, no,” Jonathan cried out. No tawky. No eatie. No nothing.
And no point in whispering anymore.
For the schoolmarm had gotten down on all fours as if reaching a decision, scrabbled across a thin layer of snow against the mountainside, and then sprung up onto the naked rock face. Clinging there somehow by the force of its limbs, it started ascending quickly toward them.
“Crap on a stick.” It had dawned on Jonathan what he was seeing.
“What? Jonathan, what?” Mamoud asked. Probably he and Rack had been asking that for seconds more than had registered with Jonathan.
“It has cilia! Not feet!”
“Who cares?” Rack said.
“You should, Rack. You should. Because it’s on the rock. It’s actually moving up the rock face.” Sliding toward him, in an awful lurch and burble, crazed and weather-torn, and snorting, and him, petrified, unable to move.
Then there was another reason he couldn’t move: Mamoud, without warning, was awkwardly sliding past Rack and up Jonathan’s body, using it disconcertingly to brace himself, silver gun drawn.
“Hey-ho! Careful, mate!” This from Rack while Jonathan, off-balance for a moment, hissed, “I’m not a diving board.”
“And I’m not made of steel,” Rack whispered and squeezed Jonathan’s leg. “Not most of me anyway. Hurry it up!”
“It may help to shoot the animal now, rather than just look at it more,” Mamoud murmured in his ear. Surprisingly, Mamoud smelled like … vanilla? “Now, just hold still a moment …”
“I haven’t a choice, Mamoud …”
There followed the comforting jut-jut-jut of Mamoud’s gun, surprisingly quiet, the bullets like little silver stars arching down toward the target. Such delicate little slivers of death.
The silver stars hit, fell right into the climbing monster … and came out the other side with both parties unscathed.
Jonathan watched in disbelief as the silver stars disappeared into the distance.
“I have put holes in the schoolmarm, but she remains unconvinced,” Mamoud called out over his shoulder, toward Rack. “Bullets are not the answer,” he added, somewhat unnecessarily, which made Jonathan realize he might be scared, out of his depth. That was a surprise.
But there was a new threat, more imminent, as Mamoud’s weight left him in retreat back off the ledge, him still lying there, staring.
This new threat issued forth from a hole in the monster’s head, writhed, streaming upward, in defiance of gravity and the idea of a rational universe.
“My god—it was fishing line before!”
Unspooling up, up, up. Fascinating strength there. Uncanny strength, for how else could something so thin and delicate-looking continue that upward extension. What kind of adaptation to what kind of environment had willed this … this appendage into being?
Truly, this creature was remarkable, brilliant, beautiful in its way.
He hadn’t the sense to move in time, still couldn’t quite believe what was happening, had just managed to kick one leg free of Rack, who didn’t understand … when the fleshy hook part at the end smacked into his forehead, stayed there to frisk his face as he recoiled, spun back toward the funicular. Then found what it wanted—his left ear—and dug in. He was too intent on fighting off the hook to scream.
But it hurt. It really hurt, and blood spurted down the side of his face. He pushed off the ground with his palms, in an awkward half crouch, as the “fishing line” that was really a thin muscular tentacle wrapped around his neck, began to pull him back toward the edge.
He had a horrific vision of his fall being broken by the needle teeth in the creature’s mouth. He reared up, tried to pull away. But the thing was too strong. Rack’s grip broke entirely and his arm was rubbed raw against stone as he accelerated to the edge.
Then the smell of vanilla cocooned him again. A weight on top of him stopped the slide. Mamoud took out his knife, cut the tentacle just below the hook, pried it from around Jonathan’s neck, and tossed the whole horrifying loop out into the abyss.
In one swift motion, Mamoud had pulled him to his feet, was helping him away from the cliff’s edge.
Then there was nothing for it but hot panic, Jonathan holding a hand to his throbbing, bloody ear, and Alice waving them into the funicular pod. She’d gotten it working. They crowded into that space, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bench-booth, stared anxious out the lichen-tinged globe of the window. Closed the hatch, locked it.
She’d already pulled the lever, and they began in a juddering, not-at-all rushed or fast or even medium-slow way, to rise up the slope. A clanking groan that repeated.
“Is there no other gear?” Jonathan asked.
“No.”
That’s when the music started, funicular music. Hideous, horrifying polka music, played tinny by some ancient music box hidden in the floorboards; now Jonathan saw the tiny circles of a speaker system or intercom. He’d not noticed before because of the rubbish at their feet: an ice-cream cone with a bite out of it, the ice cream long melted; a wooden golf club (driver) fractured in three places; a single ski; the first half of a book ominously entitled Enscrotal Mondimus. A half-burned rotary telephone that Jonathan wished would ring, really hoped would not ring.
“Are we seriously going to die to this soundtrack?” Rack said. “Is there no way to shut that off?”
“Is there no way to shut your mouth off?” Alice asked. “Or, if you like, I can turn the funicular off with this emergency switch. Then there will be no music.”
“Where is the thing anyway?” Jonathan asked. It should’ve reached the ledge by now, but hadn’t.
So they all watched the ledge to the sounds of polka music, waiting for the monster to clamber over the side.
As the pod dawdled, it gave them what under other circumstances, even with the weather, would have been a spectacular view of the surrounding peaks and the distant blue glitter far below of Comet Lake.
“Wasn’t it right behind you, Jonathan?”
“It was, it was, and closing fast.”
But still nothing appeared down below.
Instead, the telephone rang, rattling and jangling.
“I think that’s for me,” Jonathan said. Grimly.
Mamoud gave Jonathan a grim look, picked up the receiver, offered it to Jonathan.
Rack grimly said, “Please let it not be Stimply.”
“Ten to one—it’s Stimply,” Alice said, not un-grimly.
Jonathan took the receiver from Mamoud.
“Hello, Stimply,” he said in a grim tone.
A silence Jonathan hoped was rather stunned and not grim. Then, “Jonathan. How did you know?”
“More to the point, Stimply, you’re calling me in Aurora, not Earth. On a half-burned telephone. That isn’t connected to anything.”
“Well, yes, there is that, old man. Definitely got a point there. Can’t get anything by you, can I? But, putting that aside for a moment—”
“Do I have to?” Jonathan rolled his eyes at his companions.
Stimply’s tone hardened. “I’m afraid you rather do, Jonathan. Given the circumstances. Which may be grim.”
“I’m standing here holding my bloody ear together with one hand, in the world’s slowest getaway contraption, while on the lookout for a marauding monster that could pop up at any moment and kill us, Stimply. It’s already grim. Get to the point.”
“Yes, the point. Swords have points. Knives and daggers have points. Ice picks have points. Even some bird-children have points, if you include the beaks.”
“I’m about to hang up. This phone that doesn’t work.”
“YOU WILL NOT HANG UP, JONATHAN ARMISTAD LAMBSHEAD.”
Jonathan was stunned. “So that’s my middle name.”
“There’s no time. I mean, there’s plenty of time left, but not right now. Too much time.”
Gibberish again. “I don’t have time for gibberish.”
“Wait! Wait! I just wanted to tell you that when you get to the way station, there are two doors and you definitely should not take the one that—”
That’s when Jonathan dropped the receiver because the monster leapt onto the front of the pod, eclipsing the great view. It had decided to climb around the side instead and jump from there.
“Get it off !” Rack said.
“With what? How?” Alice asked.
Jonathan was on the floor, trying to grab the receiver again.
“It can’t get in,” Mamoud said.
“How do you know? Are you secretly an expert on the very monster that made all your fancy bullets look harmless as raindrops?” Rack asked.
“Because if it gets in, we will die,” Mamoud said simply.
“Stimply? Stimply?” Jonathan had the receiver again, there on his knees on the funicular’s rather grubby floor … but the line had gone dead. Great. Wonderful.
“Because there’s nothing we can do if it does,” Mamoud replied.
“That doesn’t make sense. Nothing in this damn world makes sense.”
What didn’t make sense was that Stimply could call them in Aurora, Jonathan thought. What didn’t make sense was that any excuse for a rotary telephone, no matter how massacred, maimed, torched, or toothed, could spew forth Stimply’s used-car-salesman voice.
“What happened to my mother?” he muttered, the useless phone cradled in his lap. “What really happened?” The shadow hiding behind his mind, the little dark space that had saved them outside Rome, was pulsing again, telling him to prepare for worse than a train wreck. But for what?
Against that thought, Jonathan felt numb to the horrors of the intricacies of the monster’s mouth as it tried to crack the glass with first its fangs and then the sharp glistening beak that erupted from behind the mouth.
Then with the tentacle. Which seemed most effective. The monster’s hot breath formed condensation on the glass, and with its retreat left behind odd fast-forming moss and then little crablike creatures that surged out of the moss to spin webs across that surface. As if the terrarium wasn’t the inside of the pod, but the outside.
Jonathan took out Vorpal, set the knife upon his shoulder. “Perhaps we should take stock of our weapons?”
“Perhaps, instead, we should pray we make it to the tunnel and that it peels away like used gum,” Alice said.
The monster began to call out to them, something like: “Growley scent me. Has massage. Has massage.” The insistence and repetition began to make the words sound like the lyrics to the god-awful music. Which had become ear-splitting, as if the monster’s leap onto the pod had damaged the mechanism.
“Massage?” Rack said. “Crowley wants to torture us with massage?”
“Message, message, message,” Alice said with scorn.
Jonathan slumped down on the floor. “Stimply was going to tell me something about the way station. But he didn’t. And now we’re going to have to make a last stand in this pathetic excuse for a people-mover.”
Halfway up there was another small crack in the glass.
Three quarters of the way up, the fractures were larger.
Hold fast, he remembered Sarah saying to him. Hold fast, dear son. You never know what next will come.
While the funicular juddered slow-poke style upward, the polka music played and they huddled in their seats, unable to do anything, really, but watch the show.