I looked at Eddie. “He didn’t know you’d be here. You’re our wild card in this situation.”
“It’s what I do best,” said Eddie.
“Walker, you supercilious son of a bitch!” said Sandra Chance, actually stamping one bare foot in her outrage.
“I wouldn’t argue with that,” I said. “Ladies and gentlemen, it would appear we have all been declared redundant. Might I suggest it would be in all our best interests to work together, putting aside old quarrels until we’re all safely out of here?”
“Agreed,” said Sandra, two bright red spots burning on her pale cheeks. “But Walker is mine to kill.”
“First things first,” I said. “Where is Cathy?”
“Oh, we put her in the mausoleum right behind us,” said Tommy. “Sleeping peacefully. You didn’t really think I’d stand for her being buried alive, did you? What kind of a person do you think I am?”
“I ought to shoot you both right now, on general principles,” said Suzie.
“Later,” I said firmly.
The mausoleum was a huge stone Victorian edifice, with all the usual Gothic trimmings, plus a whole bunch of decidedly portly cherubs in mourning. The Victorians could get really sentimental about death. Tommy heaved open the door, and when I looked in there was Cathy, lying curled up on the bare stone floor like a sleeping child. She was wearing something fashionable, under a thick fur coat someone had wrapped around her like a blanket. She was actually snoring slightly. Tommy edged nervously past me, leaned over Cathy, and muttered a few Words under his breath. Cathy came awake immediately and sat up, yawning and knuckling at her sleepy eyes. I moved forward into the mausoleum, and Cathy jumped up and ran forward into my arms. I held her very tightly.
“I knew you’d come and find me,” she said, into my shoulder.
“Of course,” I said. “How would I ever run my office without you?”
She finally let go, and I did, too. We went out of the mausoleum and into the night, where Tommy Oblivion and Sandra Chance were standing stiffly a little to one side. Cathy stepped briskly forward, got a good hold on Sandra’s breasts with both hands, then head-butted her in the face. Sandra fell backwards onto her bare arse, blood spurting from her broken nose. Tommy opened his mouth, either to object or explain, and Cathy kicked him square in the nuts. He went down on his knees, tears streaming past his squeezed-shut eyes, with both hands wedged between his thighs. Perhaps to reassure himself that his testicles were actually still attached.
“Messing with the wrong secretary,” said Cathy.
“Nicely done,” I said, and Cathy grinned at me.
“You are a bad influence on the child,” Suzie said solemnly.
Sometime later we all assembled around the earth barrow. Tommy moved around slowly and carefully, packing up the picnic things, while Sandra stood with her back to all of us, sniffing gingerly through the nose she’d reset herself. Suzie glared suspiciously about her, shotgun at the ready. She was convinced Walker wouldn’t have abandoned us here unless he knew there was Something in the cemetery strong and nasty enough to see us all off. She had a point. I turned to Razor Eddie.
“Walker didn’t know you’d be here. And I’m reasonably sure he doesn’t know about your new ability to cut doors into dimensions with that nasty little blade of yours. Take us home, Eddie, so we can express our extreme displeasure to him in person.”
He nodded slightly, and the pearl-handled straight razor gleamed viciously in the starlight as he cut at the air before him, in a movement so fast none of us could follow it. We all braced ourselves, but nothing happened. Eddie frowned and tried again, still to no effect. He slowly lowered his blade and considered the air before him.
“Ah,” he said finally.
“Ah?” I said. “What do you mean, ah? Is there something wrong with your razor, Eddie?”
“No, there’s something wrong with the dimensional barriers.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, Eddie.”
“I’m not too keen on it myself. Someone has strengthened the dimensional barriers, from the outside. No prizes for guessing who.”
Cathy hugged my arm tightly. “How does he know things like that?”
“I find it better not to ask,” I said. “Eddie, I… Eddie, why are you frowning? I really don’t like it when you frown.”
“Something’s… changed,” he said, his voice stark and flat. He looked around him, and we all did the same. The night seemed no different, cold and still and quiet, the graves unmoving and undisturbed under the gaudy starlight. But Eddie was right. Something had changed. We could all feel it, like the tension that precedes the breaking storm.
“You achieved something, with that spell of yours,” Eddie said to Sandra. “It’s still trying to work, undischarged in the cemetery atmosphere. It’s not enough to affect the dead, but…”
“What do you mean, ‘but’?” I said. “You can’t stop there!”
“She’s disturbed Something,” said Razor Eddie. “It’s been asleep a long time, but now it’s waking… and it’s waking angry.”
We moved closer together, staring about us and straining our ears against the silence. The atmosphere in the graveyard was changing. There was a sense of potential on the air, of something about to happen, in this place where nothing was ever supposed to happen. Suzie turned her shotgun this way and that, searching in vain for a target.
“What am I looking for, Eddie?” she said calmly. “What lives in this dimension?”
“I told you. Nothing lives here. That’s the point.”
“Could the dead be rising up after all?” said Tommy.
“It’s not the dead,” Sandra said immediately. “I’d know if it was that.”
“It’s coming,” whispered Razor Eddie.
The ground rose sharply beneath our feet, toppling us this way and that. Headstones collapsed or lurched to one side, and the great mausoleums trembled. My first thought was an earthquake, but all around us the graveyard earth was rising and falling, lifting like an ocean swell. We all scrambled onto our feet again, finding things to cling to for support.
“There were rumours,” said Sandra Chance, “of a Caretaker, set to guard the graves.”
“I never heard of any Caretaker,” said Razor Eddie.
“Yes, well, just because you’re a god doesn’t mean you know everything,” said Sandra.
And that was when the graveyard dirt burst up into the air from between the rows of graves, great fountains of dark wet earth shooting up, high into the chilly air. It rained down all around us, forming itself into rough shapes. Dark, earthy human shapes, with rough arms and legs, and blunt heads with no faces. Golems fashioned out of graveyard dirt. They started towards us, slow and clumsy with the power of earth, closing in on us from every direction at once. The ground grew still again, save for the heavy thudding of legs with no feet.
Suzie opened up with her pump-action shotgun. She hit everything she aimed at, blowing ragged chunks of earth out of the heavy lumbering figures, but it didn’t slow them down. Not even when she blew their heads off. Sandra chanted Words of Power and stabbed at the advancing earth golems with an aboriginal pointing-bone, and none of it did any good at all. Razor Eddie darted forward, moving supernaturally quickly. Several of the earth figures just fell apart, sliced through again and again. But for every golem that fell, a dozen more rose out of the graveyard earth and headed our way with silent, implacable intent.
I heard muttering beside me. Tommy Oblivion was using his gift to try to convince himself he was somewhere else, but it seemed Walker’s dimensional barriers were too strong even for him. Cathy pulled a Kandarian punch dagger from the top of her knee-length boot, and moved to watch my back. She knew her limitations. Sandra was reduced to throwing things from her belt pouches at the approaching golems. None of them did any good.
“I’ll have Walker’s balls for this!” she screamed.
“Join the queue,” I said.
I took out my Club Membership Card. Alex Morrisey gave it to me some time back, when he was in an unusually expansive mood. When properly activated, the magic stored in the Card could transport you right into Strangefellows, from wherever you happened to be at the time. I had perhaps used it more often than Alex had intended, because he was always nagging at me to return it, and yet somehow I kept forgetting on purpose to do so. But once again, the magic in the Card was no match for whatever Walker had done to the dimensional barriers. I turned to Suzie.