He looked at his companions, frozen, staring. The only sound was Martine's harsh breathing.
It's the end, he thought, and I'm still running. Still drifting. But I said I wouldn't do it anymore. . . .
Sellars needs time. This thought tore across the first like a sudden scream. The one thing we don't have. He needs time to save my friends.
And what is there for me. even if I survive? An eternity in this looking glass universe?
The black shape turned the last bend, moving in an invisible cloud of terror.
"Hello," Dread called, laughing. "Have you been waiting long?" The monster's eyes and smiling teeth gleamed out of the head-shaped shadow, as though it wore a charred mask of Comedy. "Waiting for old John? Waiting for your old chum Johnny Dark?"
The end, Paul thought. And then he ran.
He could hear the others shouting behind him, the raw surprise in their voices, but it was just noise. The poisonous fear that surrounded the shadow-figure swept over him, a stormfront of nerve-jangling, limb-deadening panic that slowed him until it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other. He staggered up the path like a man running against gale winds.
The thing called Dread stopped to watch his approach. He could feel its amused interest, but that was a solitary note in a roaring symphony of utter terror which grew louder and stronger the closer he got.
Zero. The dark. He couldn't think. He pushed himself forward two more steps. Lost. Lost! Running in the dark, lost! He took another step, his heartbeat so swift it was almost uniform, a zipper being pulled along its track, beatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeat. . . .
"So which one are you?" The thing reached out for him with a hand cold as the bottom of a grave. Its empty eyes widened as Paul took one last stumbling step, then his brain and spine could not drive him any farther. He fell to the ground at the shadow-man's feet, twitching in helpless horror.
"And what were you planning to do?" it asked him. "Challenge me to a fight? Marquis of Queenbury rules?" It bent closer. An icy finger lifted Paul's chin, forced him to meet the white, blindfish gaze, the smile glinting like ice in the black fog of its face. "I'm going to eat your heart, mate. And your friends—I'm going to take them home with me and rape their souls."
Paul's quivering hands, which for a moment had risen a few inches above the ground, dropped back to the path. As the blackness closed in on him he clung desperately to a single slender point of sanity.
"No more," he gasped.
Dread leaned down until his grinning mouth was only a finger's breadth away. Paul felt sure his heart would stop. "You aren't giving up already, are you? Oh, that's very disappointing. . . ."
"No more . . . drifting!" he screamed, and pushed off from the ground. He wrapped his arms around the shadow-thing and dragged them both over the side of the ledge.
For a long moment they fell, the dark man thrashing and struggling in his arms like an immense bat. Paul could feel Dread's surprised panic, and even through his own terror something like triumph rose. Then they slowed and stopped.
They hung in midair, Paul held like an infant at the end of Dread's outstretched arm. The grinning mouth was now contorted by rage. A terrible, scalding heat ran up Paul's body, flames suddenly crackling on his limbs, his hair, even inside him, racing up his gullet to fill his mouth. He let out a smoking shriek of agony as the monster swung him high, then flung him down, flaming like a comet, to slam against the sloping wall of the pit.
The first blow was so hard it was like something else entirely, as sudden and transformative as being struck by lightning. He dimly felt himself caroming down the uneven rock wall, limp, helpless, but it seemed very far away, strangely unimportant. Everything was broken inside him.
He stopped at last. He supposed he was still burning, but the flames were only more lights flickering before his eyes, and now all the lights were growing dim.
Doesn't feel like being a copy, he thought absently. Feels . . . just like dying.
A moving darkness floated down from above and hung just before him.
"You wasted my time. Bad choice."
Paul would have laughed, but nothing worked. What an unimportant thing to say. What an unimportant thing to think. His own thoughts were like smoke, curling and rising, lighter than the air, lighter than anything that had ever been.
I wonder if there's a copy of Heaven, too. . . .
And then he didn't think anymore.
CHAPTER 47
Star Over Louisiana
NETFEED/LIFESTYLE: Can't Diet? Maybe You Can Change Your Genes. . . .
(visuaclass="underline" genetic engineering department laboratory, Candide Institute)
VO: The Candide Institute of Toulouse, France has announced a breakthrough in the quest for what some critics have called "junk food genes," a reversal of the usual approach for dealing with poor dietary habits in the First World.
(visuaclass="underline" Claudia Jappert, Candide Institute researcher)
JAPPERT: "Some people can't improve their diet, no matter how much they try. We do not make judgments, and we are certainly not in the business of punishing people for poor habits, especially when we now believe we can optimize their body instead for the kind of food they do eat. If a few genetic adjustments can make someone better able to deal with a diet weighted toward saturated fats and sugar and too much red meat, then why should they suffer needlessly from life-shortening illnesses. . . ?"
The tears were finished now. All Olga could do was wait. There was nothing left at all, inside or out, nothing but the hiss of an empty channel. She had turned her link to Sellars all the way up—in their last moments he had grown so quiet she could scarcely make out his words—and now all that it brought her was the sound of his long absence.
Maybe it's me, she thought dully. Maybe I just can't hear anymore.
Before entering the tower she had believed she had already given up everything, but in only minutes she had been made to understand how foolish that belief had been. Thirty years of believing a terrible lie, a lie on which she had built her life and to which she had reconciled as to a decrepit but familiar home. Now it was gone.
How many times did my baby cry? And nobody came to him. She could not move, could not open her eyes. Better I never knew. Nothing could be worse than this.
The link to Sellars still blew nothing into her ear but the ghosts of electrons, the phantom voices of quanta. She tried to imagine a life spent that way, a life spent listening to a void like that, not even knowing that you were human. That it should be her son—that she, of all the mothers who had ever lived, should have been singled out for such horror. . . .
The light had changed. Through the cracks between her fingers Olga saw a spill of blue, the broad black band of a moving shadow. Her heart flip-flopped, threatened to stop entirely.
Did Sellars bring him here? After all? It was only a instant's thought as she turned, a flare of panic and hope that she knew was ridiculous, but it made the immense, dripping thing shuffling toward her all the more incomprehensible.