The meager light that reached us from above highlighted the others that were making their way down and around, on surfaces we couldn’t make out. Light touching a bald head here, an outstretched arm there. A little further away, a haggard woman stood with her arms spread, face turned skyward. Soaking up even this pitiful indirect moonlight the way I’d soaked up the sun before.
“Oh man,” Evan said, and I could only just barely hear him over the cacophony of noise around us. “Oh man, oh man, oh man.”
Hillsglade House had disintegrated and what had been high was now low, hallways sloped with only one wall and one floor, or a twist of plaster ceiling that cracked underfoot like so much ice when we let our feet linger too long. The tumultuous movements of our surroundings weren’t smooth, but jerking, lurching.
A section of porch came down, apparently pulled from its perch when an Other tried to climb on it. It struck a surface, bouncing, and the Other went flying in the opposite direction, head over heels.
No way, given trajectory, that it would come close to us. It traveled left to right, a hundred feet ahead of us.
All the same, everything had purpose down here. Everything played a part in wearing us down.
We moved along a section of broken hallway that swayed as though it were suspended by ropes, the midsection tilting left and right as our weight reached it. It was as if things were only barely held together, here, while the Abyss struggled to piece it together. To either side, there was only darkness, and it was a darkness as dangerous as the void of space. There would be little to nothing to catch us if we fell.
My eye tracked the section of porch as it disappeared into shadow.
Behind the bell’s tolling, the countless noises of things settling into place, I could hear the crunch.
Too perfectly timed.
“Heads down!” I bellowed.
My hand found Evan, and I cast him forward, toward the others.
One Behaim woman was so startled at the noise of my voice that she nearly fell right there. She twisted and lost her balance, arms wheeling.
I grabbed her, and I hauled her back.
A mass came careening down at a sharp angle, spinning end over end. It struck the middle of the hallway like a great hatchet.
A gap formed and yawned wide in the same moment, as though the connections holding the hallway up were only attached at certain points. We teetered away from the other half, until fifteen feet separated me and the Behaim woman from the others.
I could see Alister with his arm around Rose’s shoulders. My friends, Evan. The High Priest, Ellie, Christoff, and Kathryn.
The intention had been for Evan to help the others dodge whatever was coming.
Plumes of dust obscured the shadows to either side.
“Fuck you!” the Behaim woman cried out, nearly drowned out by the bell. “Fuck!”
I blinked.
“I could have made it!”
No you couldn’t have.
“You might as well have thrown me over the side!”
“Don’t tempt me,” I said.
“What? Say again!”
I didn’t clarify.
The ground swayed just a bit as Evan settled on my shoulder, returning to my side.
“Fly?” he asked.
“Can’t fly with a passenger,” I said, raising my voice to be heard.
Looking past the gap, I could see Rose pointing at the staircase at the far end of the ‘hall’. Which was more of a bridge, and a dangerously tilted one. Everyone on there was gripping something, and I wasn’t positive that the bookcases that lined the side like a strange railing wouldn’t simply break away at the most inconvenient time.
I motioned for her to go. I’d have to catch up, but we couldn’t delay.
They lurched forward, moving diagonally to get from handhold to handhold and scale the incline.
Very carefully, I advanced down the decline that pointed down toward the chasm between the two sections of hall. The darkness below matched the darkness that lay beyond the short and ragged bookcases on either side of the hall.
Except as I continued to stare, I could make out the same section of porch that had divided the hallway. There was a platform, deceptively solid looking, and a criss-crossing mess of wood planks and rails from the porch, collapsed against some surface or another.
My eye traced the new route. Down perhaps twenty feet, almost two stories, then forward, and a matching climb up to the platform the others had been on.
“No,” the Behaim woman said. She was looking in the same direction, clinging to a bookshelf. “No way.”
“It’s probably a trap anyway,” I said. “Things here don’t cooperate.”
“They’re leaving us behind!”
She’s scared, I reminded myself. She’s not rational.
“We need to goooo!” Evan said.
The abyss had an intelligence to it. There was an organic flow to the way things happened, the why of it. Obvious enough with the way it had showed me select visions. There was a strategy.
The strategy here was simple. Attacking me by forcing me to make a choice. Leave her, or fall behind.
I smelled burning hair.
A scream echoed from below us, loud, close and forceful enough to momentarily drown out the Bell.
“The Barber,” Evan said.
“He’s coming,” I said. “He’s letting us know.”
“The demon,” the Behaim woman said. “Wards? I can erect defenses. Buy us time.”
“He can bypass most defenses,” I said.
“He- No, I refuse to believe that! Every problem has a solution! If I manipulate time…”
She looked at me, head snapping around.
“Bridge!” the woman cried out, abrupt. “Can you tear apart that bookcase? I can freeze it in time.”
“That isn’t a perception trick?” I asked.
“You know?” She asked, staring. She shook her head a bit, and our section of hallway reacted, swaying slightly, like a boat on water. “It’s my personal reserve!”
I looked at the bookcase, touched it.
“Hurry!” she said.
“Things here don’t cooperate,” I said. “It’s a trap. Tear it apart and we might lose our footing.”
“Hurry!”
“Can you unfreeze?” I asked. “Promptly?”
“Yes.”
“Freeze me,” I told her. “Use me-”
I had to stop as a rumble made everything shake.
“-As a stepping stone!” I raised my voice to be heard.
She looked at me like I was crazy.
“Can you? Do you need to prepare?”
She shook her head.
I wasn’t sure which question she was answering with that negatory gesture, but one hand now covered her mouth, and it looked like she was gagging.
Before things got too bad, then…
“Evan, help me, circle back and help her!”
“Got it!”
I spread my wings, and I leaped. I worried the ground would break underfoot or tilt to the point of dumping her down into the darkness.
But I couldn’t turn to look. I could only focus on covering the distance.
There was a flash, and as the darkness settled once again, I saw that the hallway was gone. Floorboards had tilted and fallen into the gap, and the gap itself had widened to about thirty feet.
I saw the woman on the other side. She’d landed, then scrambled for safe ground before unfreezing me.