And Walter, feeling like a conductor, poised with baton held high above the orchestra pit.
“Now,” he said. Or maybe he just thought it.
And the gate opened.
* * *
Allan peered down through the skylight of the warehouse at the tremulous shimmer that had boiled to life like steam from a kettle in the middle of the circle of musicians. He had seen that light before, on the same night he had first seen the two hippies from Reiden Lake. The same night the pigs and their dogs had chased him into the water. The same night he had tumbled through the strange gateway and found himself in another world that was so like, and yet so unlike, his own.
He had always wondered what had opened the gate that brought him to this world, but he had never been able to formulate any kind of concrete theory. It had all happened too quickly, and in the middle of such chaos, that he hadn’t been able to objectively observe the phenomenon.
He’d turned the mystery over in his mind during his idle hours, and had even considered the possibility that it might have been his own desperate desire to escape that had somehow opened up a hole between worlds, and granted him his wish.
But here was a much more convincing explanation. He had just seen the entire assemblage take acid and arrange themselves in a circle around this weird machine, to participate in some sort of communal trip. And out of that trip had risen the shimmer.
It must have been the same at Reiden Lake. He was tripping, and those kids must have been tripping, too, linking the three of them into a mutual experience that had opened a hole in the fabric between their worlds, and allowed him to fall through.
Allan’s heart clenched like a fist in his chest as it all became clear. Those two seemingly harmless, bumbling idiots had come to San Francisco not just to stop him, but to send him back to the world of his birth.
He stood and stepped back from the skylight. This could not happen. He could not allow it to happen.
As he drew his gun and turned back to the edge of the roof, he paused. There was smoke in the air. And the sound of screaming.
22
The trip was breaking up, fading fast. Above them, the shimmering gate was dissipating as well, its long, reaching tendrils breaking into watery fragments that spun away into misty nothingness.
Roscoe sat up beside Walter on the Persian carpet and looked up at the skylight.
“Oh... wow, man,” he said. “That thing, it was... wow... I think I got enough material out of that trip for an entire concept album. We need to jam. Right now, while the juices are still flowing!”
Roscoe leapt to his feet and staggered over to the piano. Walter blinked and looked up—he had been completely focused on Bell, trying to hold open the connection for as long as possible.
In the background, he registered sounds from outside, but they were too far away for him to identify their nature.
“B-flat,” Roscoe said, fingers playing over the keys with a funky little riff.
Walter ignored the ecstatic singer and looked over at Nina, who still stood by with her handgun and stopwatch, just outside of the circle.
“How long?” he asked. “How long was it open.”
She checked the watch.
“Thirty-seven seconds,” she said. “Maybe thirty-eight.”
Iggy the drummer sat up, scratching his beard and wearing a dreamy expression. Beside him Chick Spivy was suddenly reanimated by the sound of Roscoe’s playing, and responded by rolling over and unlatching his guitar case.
“That’s it, man,” he said, unwrapping a length of cord and plugging into the wall of amps. He prodded the prone base player with the toe of a battered Frye boot. “Come on, Davey! Get in on this.”
A blast of wailing sound hit Walter like a tidal wave as Chick strummed out a set of heavy power chords.
“Alone I was only able to open the gate for a few seconds,” Walter hollered, gesturing wildly at Bell and shouting at the top of his lungs to be heard over the music. “And together, you and I kept it open for what, ten seconds? Fifteen?”
“It’s so obvious, I can’t believe we didn’t think of it sooner.” Bell rolled away from the drum kit as Iggy mounted up and started banging out a back beat. “More people. Longer time. And having the alpha wave generator helped us all synchronize minds and stay connected. It allowed us to link minds and share the same trip. We opened the portal together, wider and longer than ever before.”
Bell scooped up the alpha wave generator and slipped it into the canvas messenger bag he’d used to bring it in.
“But this is excellent.” Walter grabbed one of Bell’s arms with his right hand and one of Nina’s with the left, and dragged them toward the door, away from the wall of throbbing sound emanating from the happy and oblivious musicians. “Thirty-eight seconds, even twenty-eight, would surely be enough time to goad our quarry through the rift. All we have to do is gather another similarly sized test group.” He shouldered open the door and shoved Nina and Bell through. “Then lure the killer to the spot as the trip reaches its—” he slammed the door “—peak.”
The shouted word peak echoed down the street, way too loud now that the music was muffled by the closed door.
“Is that all?” Nina said, raising a sarcastic eyebrow. “And how do you propose that we set it up? Who do you suggest we...”
Walter frowned, held up a finger, and looked around.
“Does anyone else smell smoke?” he asked.
They scanned the length of the block, and spotted flickering orange light playing over the brick and corrugated metal skins of the buildings at the far end of the block. The night was suddenly thick with the stink of burning plastic, and filled with frightened shouts. From the shipyard across the street came a sound like bridge cables twisting in a high wind.
“Oh, dear.” Walter closed his eyes. “Not again.”
“I thought there weren’t any people in this neighborhood?” Bell said.
“There weren’t supposed to be,” Nina said. “Not on this block, anyway. But if more trippers equaled a longer duration for the gate, maybe it also equaled a wider psychic blast radius.”
“Did you notice the tendrils spreading out from the edges of the gateway?” Walter asked.
“Yes!” Bell replied. “Clearly that’s the moment when the psychic bleed through begins. Nina, do you remember how long the gate was open before the tendrils became visible?”
A scream from an alley three buildings to the left cut off her reply.
“Get ’em off me!” A high, tremulous voice echoed through the alley. “Get ’em off!”
Walter and Bell exchanged a look and ran to the mouth of the narrow passageway. A few yards in, a homeless man was crabbing backward out of his bedroll as if there was a snake in it, and pressing against the dumpster that had been serving as a shelter.
“Get ’em off!” he screeched.
“The DTs?” Bell suggested, brow arched. “Not uncommon in alcoholics.”
Walter took a few cautious steps closer to the squirming man.
“No,” he said. “Look!”
Under the harsh glare of a security light, he could see the man’s naked, grime-caked torso was covered in what looked like rat bites. He was bleeding from more than a dozen crescent-shaped punctures.
Walter ran and grabbed the bottom of the roll and pulled, helping the man shuck clear of the bedding, then threw it away and knelt beside the man.
“Are you alright?” Walter asked. “What was biting you? Was it rats?”
But the man was still twisting and swatting at nothing.
“Get ’em off me!” he cried. “Get ’em off me!”