***
Jim was becoming more than a little concerned about the deteriorating condition of the environment. It had been a mess when they had arrived; now it was becoming messier by the minute. Jagged orange-white lightning crashed between huge thunderheads that were rapidly moving in from beyond the mountains. The lake moved with bizarre and chaotic ripples, and huge bubbles broke the surface. The great screen still hung over it, but the images of the Mysteres were continuously distorted. The ground under Jim’s feet quivered, while on the headland a small but growing wind vortex whirled dirt, dead leaves, and the limp, lifeless corpses of bluebirds into the air. In the middle of it all, Bernadette was attempting to rally her nuns and angels. Jim yelled to Doc, “By the looks of it, we’ve got some apocalyptic trouble coming hard down on us.”
A sudden sinkhole, some twenty feet wide, opened in the terrace, right under the scarlet Tiger tank. The machine crashed down into it and its gas tank exploded, shooting flame, black smoke, and chunks of hot metal into the air. Doc coughed blood into his hankerchief and shook his head. “And I fear this is the bona fide end of the world. At least for this cosmic neck of the cosmic woods.”
In confirmation of just how bona fide the end of the world really was, a great light like something from the Book of Revelation blossomed in the sky. A nun began screaming, “It’s God, I see God!”
Doc stared at the sky with a resigned and quizzical expression. “Either that or a thermonuclear airburst was just added to our catalogue of woe.”
***
A section of corridor ceiling crashed down behind Aimee and Semple, and the two of them broke into a run. A crystal chandelier was dripping liquid glass like melting ice. The vibration was now worse than the worst earthquake Semple had ever experienced in lifeside Los Angeles or San Francisco. She was still carrying the gun she’d found, but she had little idea as to what she was going to do next. Her single impulse was to get out into the open before the entire structure collapsed and buried them. She imagined that if one was buried alive it could take an agonizing time to expire and that wasn’t the way she wanted to return to the pods, fighting for breath as dirt filled her mouth, nose, and lungs, and chunks of masonry crushed her bones. Her only thought was to get back to Jim and Doc, and if relying on the two men was the best she could come up with, she knew she was tactically tapped out.
The building shook again and a huge chunk of plaster smashed into the floor directly in front of them. Aimee stumbled over a fallen beam and would have gone down if Semple hadn’t grabbed her by the arm. “Just keep moving, okay? Just keep moving.”
Aime clung to Semple, her grip like a vice. “Semple, promise me.”
“Promise you what?”
“Promise you won’t let me just disappear into nothing.”
***
The white light became approximately spherical and touched down between the lake and the terrace, if “touched down” was the right phrase. Bit by bit it began to diminish until it was no longer so hard on the eyes, and a figure became visible at its center. Jim wondered if perhaps one of the Mysteres had relented and decided to rescue them after all. Hypodermic, La Flambeau, and Tonnerre were still up on the screen, but the chance remained that some other Voodoo god had taken pity on them. If he was really lucky, maybe it was the beautiful Erzulie-Severine-Belle-Femme, or at least Ogou Baba or the venerable Marie-Louise.
The glare of the sphere not only diminished, but flattened to the ground, became two-dimensional, and spread rapidly outward, running across what had once been Aimee’s prize lawn, hugging the contours in a perfect geometric ring of bright energy. Many of the nuns fled as it came toward them, but since Doc was standing his ground, Jim did the same, and as the arc of energy went past and through him he felt nothing but a slight electric tingle. He looked to Doc for some kind of comment, but Doc was staring intently at the figure that stood in the epicenter of the power ring.
The figure was certainly not one of the Voodoo gods Jim had previously seen, and totally lacked any trace of their characteristic flamboyance. In many respects, it resembled a Carthusian monk, in its full-length gray robe. The cowl was pulled up and forward over the being’s face, so it was fully hidden from Jim. As the ring of light reached what seemed to be some outer perimeter and faded to nothing, the figure slowly turned and raised a hand in greeting to the three Mysteres on the screen, who, in turn, bowed with infinite courtesy. The exchange was so mutually respectful that Jim could only assume the salutations were between entities who were acknowledged equals. With the niceties of formal protocol observed, the robed figure shifted its attention to what was going on around it, and actually spoke. To Jim’s complete surprise, the figure’s voice had the carefully trained and modulated tones of an English Shakespearean actor. “Would someone like to explain what exactly is going on here?”
Jim looked at Doc and Doc looked at Jim, and all of the nuns looked at each other. Since the question had not been specifically directed at anyone in particular, everyone seemed to be wondering who ought to answer and waiting for someone else to step into the breach. For a moment it looked as though Doc was going to make the move. He drew himself up to his full height and coughed once, but before he could utter a word, Semple and Aimee appeared on the terrace. Semple looked more angry and distraught than Jim had ever seen her. She also had a gun in her hand, a small, light-caliber machine pistol that must have been dropped by one of the red nuns. At first sight of the robed figure, she didn’t hesitate. She lifted the pistol and fired a withering, full-auto burst straight at it.
***
When Semple saw Anubis’s onetime Dream Warden standing on the scorched earth between the terrace and the lake, all thought and reason left her. She lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger. She didn’t even know if the pistol would fire at all. It might even have been out of ammunition and completely useless. It actually came as a total surprise when the thing roared and bucked in her hand, spraying out the entire contents of the clip in what seemed like little more than a second. She was equally surprised when the burst of fire had no effect whatsoever on its target. With a move so leisurely it could only have been a time distortion, the Dream Warden raised a hand, and a curved, shimmering, bullet-stopping energy field appeared in front of his body. Furious at the ineffectual pointlessness of her reaction, Semple hurled the gun petulantly to the ground, anticipating hideous retribution at any moment. Her third surprise was when the Dream Warden, instead of blasting her to horrible perdition, merely sounded a little disappointed. “Now, is that any way for old acquaintances to greet each other?”
“Acquaintances ?”
“We were both at the court of Anubis.”
“You were the fucking heart of darkness, the evil behind the throne . . . ”
The Dream Warden sounded quite pleased with himself. “I can pull together rather a good show when I put my mind to it.”
“A show . . . ?”
“Couldn’t you tell I was feeding his madness? I like to think that you and I, with a little help from Gojiro, did a reasonably efficient job of getting rid of him and his wretched kingdom.”
Semple almost pleaded. “Who are you?”
The Dream Warden sighed. “Oh dear, I suppose it was a mistake to arrive in the Dream Warden drag, but I do rather like the way it stops people from wanting me to do things for them.”
The Dream Warden unbelted the robe and let it fall to the ground at his feet, and Semple found herself facing a cultivatedly distinguished middle-aged man who greatly resembled the actor Christopher Plummer. He was dressed in an immaculate double-breasted white linen Savile Row suit with every crease as sharp as a knife. An aquamarine shirt with a matching Windsor-knotted tie gave a roguish, almost mobster aspect to the ensemble, although this was offset by a slight femininity of posture. Semple wasn’t sure if he was actually homosexual or merely arrogantly English. A white Persian cat that must have been hidden in the sleeve of the Dream Warden robe scrambled up onto his shoulder and sat staring at Semple with blue eyes that nearly matched the shirt and tie.