THE PECULIAR SPAT them out. They tumbled, not falling as much as rematerializing in a stagger, hands still linked: Emma first, then Casey, and finally Eric. A ball of sound broke over them, an echoing scream that rebounded off rock and doubled, and Emma thought, Cave. For a second, she thought they might still be in Bode’s nightmare: same story, different page. Then the floor undulated and bunched, and whatever else she might have thought after that turned to dust in her mind.
The birds spread in a roiling, living carpet. Emma smelled blood and the birds’ feral, almost metallic stink. A thousand glassy eyes glittered; black beaks gaped to reveal pink mouths and yellow tongues. Most were crows, but there were a few owls, their curved talons slick and stained with blood, stringy with dark flesh.
As if responding to some signal, the birds lifted as one in a broad, ebony curtain and shot toward some spot high above, leaving behind shredded clothing and a tumble of stained bone. The birds massed—and then seemed to melt into the ceiling. They fell utterly silent without even so much as a rustle. Yet they were there; their beetle-bright eyes studded the ceiling in an alien galaxy, a splash of eerie starlight.
That was when Emma realized something else: she could see herself. Not from their eyes; she wasn’t in the birds’ heads, thank God. But she saw herself, as well as Casey and Eric, reflected from the rock high above, at their feet, and all around. They went on and on, another Emma/Eric/Casey and yet another Emma/Eric/Casey and another and another and another: an infinite number of Emmas and Erics and Caseys marching away to the end of time.
The cave was an immense black-mirror sphere.
“Emma,” Eric said, and pointed. “Look. Inside that circle of candles.”
She followed his gaze, and a blast of horror swept through her body.
“No.” Casey’s voice was an anguished whisper. “No.”
RIMA SWAYED. HER body glistened, as if she’d been dipped in red paint. More blood dribbled in crimson rills from her mouth, her ears, her shredded wrists, and a thousand rips in her skin. Her shirt was a bib of purple gore, and Emma gasped as fresh blood blossomed in a dark rose over Rima’s stomach. Blood leaked through tiny fissures in her skin to form rivulets that ran down her legs and dripped from her fingers to puddle on the rock with a sodden, dull puh-puh-puh-puh. Rima looked like a porcelain doll done in a fine crackle-glaze: a leaky vessel through which her life’s blood seeped and would soon drain away completely.
“We’re too late.” Casey was trembling. “We’re too late; it’s got her.”
“Good for you, Casey!” Rima boomed, although the voice was not hers, or the whisper-man’s either, the one Emma had heard in her blinks of Madison and that asylum. Definitely a man’s voice, though.
Beside her, she heard Eric suck in a breath. “What?” she asked. Eric’s skin had gone white as salt. “Eric?”
“Oh God.” Eric’s face was a mask of horror. “God, no, please don’t do this.”
“No.” Casey tensed, and he might have sprung into the circle if Eric hadn’t snatched his brother’s arm. “No, no!” Casey was crying, trying to fight his way free. “It’s not right, it’s not right!”
“Now, Casey. Son.” The monster wearing Rima made a tsk-tsk. “Is that any way to talk to Dear Old Dad?”