As Frost’s final words came back to her, Constance sat up. Spots danced in the darkness before her eyes. With effort, she freed her arms from a broken timber that lay across her leg and carefully felt along her ribs, shoulders, and spine. Everything hurt. But nothing, it seemed, was broken. She pushed more debris away, then rose, coughing at the clouds of brick dust. She took an unsteady step, then another, feeling her way through a ruined tangle of furniture, joists, and plaster. A wall brought her progress to a halt. Using her hands, she felt along it until she found a doorknob. With an effort, she pulled the door partway open, and — seeing a faint red light beyond — stepped through.
But she was not on the landing at the top of the narrow stairs. Rather, she was in a partially collapsed hallway, lit only by emergency exits. Her eyes, long used to darkness, adjusted. She was on the hotel’s fourth floor, surrounded by the rubble from above. Frost. She was gone now — in more ways than one. But nevertheless, Constance realized what she had to do. She walked down the hall. Reaching the staircase, she descended to the lobby, then to the basement. How long had she been unconscious? It was silent outside; the beast was no longer screaming.
She went down the basement corridor, through the wardrobe, and into the room with the machine. To her surprise, the light was on and it was running at high power, the whole room vibrating, the dial turned past II. As she stared into the portal, she saw that the image had changed. The view of Times Square an hour into the future was gone, replaced by a tunnel of coruscating light, the distant endpoint now just a muddy, swirling pool, as if it had been recently disturbed.
She looked at her watch. More than forty-five minutes had passed since they had first seen the destruction of Savannah through this portal. There wasn’t much time left... if there was any time at all. Savannah was already becoming the burning ruin they had seen on the news screens.
But that was not her concern: not now. She stared into the portal. The image at the far end of the tunnel was beginning to clear. And at last, she could once again see Times Square: distant, attenuated.
She recognized it immediately, intimately — but it was not the Times Square of the present, but rather its predecessor, Longacre Square. The wide square was paved with dirty cobblestones. Iron hitching posts for horse carts ran parallel to the pavements. There were no automobiles to be seen. Police with nightsticks, wearing helmets resembling Prussian pickelhauben, directed traffic of horse-drawn carriages and drays.
It was like a scene from a snow globe: a glimpse from her childhood long, long ago.
She recalled again what the dying Frost had told her. But of course.
She was wasting time. Without a second thought, she lunged through the portal.
76
It was like being scooped up in a curling wave. She was whirled about, bands of light and dark whipping past her, until she managed to stabilize herself on a spongy surface of light. She was deep in the tunnel. At its end was the place from her childhood: not minutes, not an hour, but more than a century back in time. The walls of parallel universes around her turned endlessly as she passed by, like leaves from a magic book, each page opening into some strange world of wonder — or terror.
The beast that was savaging Savannah came from one of these worlds. But which? She watched as the layers turned, folding and overlapping. And then she saw an insect — a dragonfly, with the deformed head of a mosquito — wriggle out from one of the folds. Recognizing it, she forced her way in.
A moment of blankness, and she found herself lying on her back, surrounded by a plain of pure, unrelieved white. She struggled to her feet, instinctually grasping her stiletto. She glanced around, head still aching as she took in the otherworldly landscape: the brilliant plain, the black walls of a crater in the distance, the two suns and pink-to-black sky.
Her eyes fell on the strange, powdery white ground. In it she saw a disturbance, like a faint snow angel, and beyond, a set of footprints leading away.
She knelt to examine the marks more closely. There was a clear handprint, and the impressions of shoes. Pendergast.
So the thing she’d dreaded had happened. He’d made the same deductive leap that she had and come through the portal. Perhaps he’d even succeeded, if the silence she’d heard from outside the hotel was any indication. Had the monster vanished? Had he managed to kill it here, in its own universe?
Whatever the case, the tracks led in only one direction. They did not return.
She began to follow them, heart pounding, stiletto in hand. She moved as rapidly as possible, ignoring the pain, bounding along in the low gravity. At one point, she saw a pack of hyena-like creatures with insect heads, but at the sight of her they immediately fled.
Pendergast’s trail led straight to the base of a ridge formed out of black frozen lava. As she followed the track, just before reaching the lava, Constance heard a rumbling sound and felt the ground vibrate. Suddenly the surface of the plain to her right bulged upward and fractured, snowy powder dancing into the air from the disturbance.
She halted.
The cracks widened and then a head appeared: a shiny beetle skull with black eyes and long, curved mandibles that clacked as they moved. It stared at her, then began to slide out, exposing a long oily body with a cluster of eggs adhering to its belly.
Constance held her ground.
The creature continued to slither up and out of the ground until its entire body was exposed, coiling and recoiling around itself, snapping its hairy mandibles. It approached her slowly, cautiously, a brute at least five feet in length. But its intent was obvious: it was a predator, and she was prey.
Still Constance remained motionless. She sensed that to retreat, to give even an inch, would be fatal.
“Stay back!” she warned, holding out her stiletto.
The creature drew itself up, coiling ever tighter as its bug eyes stared at her.
She stared back. It was impossible to get close enough to stab it — the mandibles were each a foot long and capable of crushing her.
She flipped the knife around, and — grasping its blade between thumb and forefinger — aimed, then threw it as hard as she could.
It struck the creature square in the left eye, which immediately split open with a nasty wet sound, spewing green jelly. With a high-pitched hiss and a frantic clacking, the beast stabbed its tail into the plain and dug itself back into the ground, disappearing into a cloud of white powder, leaving behind a viscous, quivering pool of jelly — and her knife.
“Bitch,” Constance muttered as she picked up the stiletto and wiped it off.
Quickly, she made her way to the base of the lava ridge and climbed. Gaining its summit and peering over the upper edge, she saw a bizarre sight. Inside a nest of reddish sand set amid the lava beds, a gigantic white maggot was mewling and wriggling, waving its tiny black head back and forth as it sat on a brood comb of squirming grubs. It was bleeding from a wound.
It looked like a gunshot wound, with an entrance and exit.
Her eye was drawn to a scene of violence a few hundred yards away. A cluster of lava cones crowded an area of black basalt. Circling the cone nearest the nest were half a dozen dead creatures like the one ravaging Savannah. They were lying amid puddles of blood and gore, their insectoid heads shot to pieces. One of the creatures lay apart from the others, slumped on the side of the cone, wings broken and crooked. There was something under it — a human body.