“We put it there to keep the fabric of the wound in space/time from getting any larger,” Thursday had told me. “We can’t close the hole back up, but the clock-construct will keep it from getting any worse.”
Based on what he could tell me, I’d had the bureau’s tech boys and girls get to work, and so, with my special lights and special goggles, I was actually able to see what was happening as midnight came and the Wednesday dimension opened into our own.
It wasn’t pretty.
The clock began to strike midnight. On the twelfth toll, the space around the clock — there’s no other way to put it — split open. What came pouring out was light like a bad bruise and wisps of something smoky yet as liquid as dripping glue that nevertheless had the shape of living creatures, with limbs and a depressing bump where a head should be. Their eyes were empty black holes, but they were holes that melted and ran like the yolks of soft-boiled eggs. Flapping, ragged mouths gaped beneath them, and I was grateful I couldn’t hear the noise they made, because I could feel it vibrating in my bones and even that was sickening.
I turned on the “brass knuckles”, as the technicians had named them, which looked like a couple of glass and wire watchbands, one of them big enough to stretch over the Hand of Doom. For a moment I felt the vibration they made, then my hands just…weren’t anymore. I couldn’t feel them at all. I hoped that meant that the Wednesday Men would. I stepped toward the clock.
“You’re not going anywhere, Sloppy Face,” I told the nearest of them and swung at him. There wasn’t much in the way of a satisfying impact, but kind of snap and sizzle like an electrical shock, and the thing flailed backward, its nasty mouth all hooty and shocked. I grinned. “Didn’t like that, huh? Well, come and see what we’re serving on Wednesdays around here from now on!”
It was the donnybrook of all donnybrooks and it went on for hours. It was like flying all the way to Asia with in-flight entertainment by the Spanish Inquisition. I could only touch them with my hands, but tey hit, scratched and bit. Sometimes they grabbed me and it burned, burned bad. Then for a little while they’d retreat and huddle in the glowing depths of the clock, just inside the gap into their dimension, and look out at me like eels hiding in the rocks, whispering to each other in a deep, soundless rumble I could feel in my teeth. That would give me a few minutes to rest before they broke out and tried me again. Like I said, hours went by, and I had only one thought: Keep ‘em here. Don’t let ‘em past.
I had a few other weapons from the tech boys, but I knew ultimately I wouldn’t be able to push them all back by myself. I just had to hang in and keep them in the vicinity of the clock until the rest of the plan kicked in. When I absolutely couldn’t make it another moment without rest, Every now I chucked one of my precious supply of vibration-augmented grenades at them, which disrupted them and probably hurt them like hell, too — in any case, each grenade sent them flapping and slurping back into the breach for a bit. Then they’d get back their courage and come at me again.
It was pretty much like the Spartans at Thermopylae. I had to stop them and keep them here. As long as they were busy trying to kill me, or occupying the various stuffed animal corpses, we had a chance. If they got beyond the perimeter, we were in trouble.
And, yeah, they used everything — stag and boar heads jumping off the walls, gouging and biting, stuffed ferrets breaking loose from their pedestals to run snapping up my trouser legs. Even the giant Kodiak bear made a re-appearance about six in the morning, at a moment when I was feeling particularly exhausted. I was ready for it this time, though and after about half an hour rolling around with it I broke off its arms, then let out all its stuffing with a Gurkha knife.
Things got a little quieter as the sun rose — the Wednesday Men didn’t seem to like the light very much — but I couldn’t afford to turn my back on them and I certainly didn’t dare sleep. I popped a few amphetamine tablets I’d brought with me and did my best to pay attention. I walked around the place beating the random crap out of anything alive that shouldn’t have been, trying to keep all activity confined to the area around the clock. I did have time to eat a sandwich in the middle of the day, which was nice. I’d brought a sack lunch, including two packages of Twinkies. It’s the little things that make fighting for the survival of our dimension worthwhile.
Damn, I was tired, though. Things began to ramp up again as the sun set on Wednesday night — the things might not have understood who I was or what I was doing, but they were clearly getting frustrated as hell. As soon as the dark came they were all over me again in earnest, and I can’t really tell you what happened for the next several hours. I just fought to stay alive, using my vibration-enhanced hands and weapons on the things themselves, using the clubs and knives I’d brought with me to beat the unholy bejabbers out any of the stuffed corpses they hid themselves in the way hermit crabs used seashells.
The last hour before midnight was the worst. I think they’d begun to get an inkling that I meant to do more than deprive them of their fun for a single week, and if I thought they’d fought hard before, I hadn’t seen anything. I wished for about the hundredth time I’d brought more help from the Bureau, but I hadn’t wanted to risk anyone else. I still had no idea what was going to happen at the end — for all I knew, we’d wind up with a scorched hole a mile wide where the town had been, or something even worse, like a blackened rip in the space/time continuum. itself
At the end, they finally got me. I was boneless as a flatworm, exhausted, battered, sucking air but not catching my breath, and to be honest, I couldn’t even remember why I was fighting. A bunch of them charged and pulled me down, then they swarmed over me like giant moaning jellyfish. That was it, I knew. All over. I was too tired to care.
Then, from what seemed like a hundred miles away I heard the grandfather clock begin to chime, a surprisingly deep, slow sound, and suddenly the light around me changed color, from purple-blue to a bright reddish-orange. The things on top of me rolled off, buzzing in surprise, as a host of new shapes burst from the clock. They didn’t look a thing like human beings, but they didn’t look like the Wednesday Men either, and I knew that Grayson Thursday had kept his word and brought his friends. The cavalry had come.
“Pull them back in!” I shouted, although the Thursday folk probably couldn’t understand me or perhaps even hear me. Nevetheless, they knew what to do. The orange, glowing shapes grabbed my attackers and the other Wednesday Men and began to drag them back toward the shimmering lights of the big clock. Not that the moaning jellyfish-things went without a fight — people were dying, that was clear, even if they didn’t look like people.
It seemed to go on for an hour, but it must have happened during the twelve times the clock struck. At the end, the last of the glowering Wednesday shapes had been pulled back into the breach, and one of the Thursday Men looked back at me with his face that wasn’t a face.
“Thanks, buddy!” I shouted. “Now I suggest you all duck!” I pulled out the egg grenade. I’d saved it for last, saved it carefully. Not only was it set to the same vibrational field as the Wednesday Men — and that of their entire dimension — but I’d had one of my friends down in New Orleans prepare it for me, so the grenade itself was taped to a black hen’s egg full of serious hoodoo powder. See, hoodoo magic is crossroads magic, and if a place where one world runs into another isn’t a crossroad, I don’t know what is. I ‘d gone to see some folks who knew how to deal with such things.