“So,” I said, as cheerfully as possible under the circumstances. “It’s down to us to save the day. Again. Where do we start?”
Benway looked at Julien. “Is he always this cocky?”
“Usually,” said Julien. “One of the reasons I suggested he be made Walker. He really does have a lot of experience in saving the world against impossible odds. But don’t stand too close to him while he’s doing it. Dr. Benway, question. Do we have any idea who these invading aliens are? Do we have a name, or even a species description? Any idea at all of what they are or where they’re from?”
“No,” said Benway. She looked through the porthole again, and winced. “The patient couldn’t tell us anything, including his own name. Diagnostic equipment revealed his condition but not who or what caused it. If this were a standard possession or alteration, the Ward’s own defences and protections would have kicked in; so I can only assume this is something a lot more powerful than we’re used to.”
Julien frowned, tapping his chin thoughtfully with one knuckle. “The Authorities keep a watchful eye on the various Timeslips as they come and go in the Nightside because they’re the most common launching sites for an invasion, but if these aliens have found a new way to open new doors, less obvious than Timeslips . . . we could be in real trouble. We have to stop this invasion here, slap it down hard, and send the aliens a message they won’t forget in a hurry.”
“Oh, I can do that,” I said.
Julien glared at me. “Preferably a message that will still leave the Hospice intact and standing afterwards!”
“All right, I got it!” I said. “Honestly, you blow up one lousy building, and they never let you forget it . . .”
I edged closer to the steel door. Terrible sounds rose and fell on the other side, and awful lights flared through the porthole. Whatever was happening in there was escalating. I reached out one hand to touch the door, and my fingers sank right into the steel. As though the solid metal were nothing more than soft mud. I snatched my hand back. The soft, pulsating mass that had been solid steel started to stretch after me, then fell back again.
“What the hell was that?” said Benway, clearly shaken.
“I’ve encountered this before,” I said, a little freaked-out. I held my hand up before my eyes and shook it back and forth, checking for signs of damage. My fingers tingled unpleasantly, odd and eerie sensations prickling up and down them in sudden runs. “Remember when the Springheel Jack Meme broke through from another dimension, Julien? The starting point was an old door in an abandoned warehouse, down on Damnation Row. By the time I got there, the whole wall was affected, rising and falling like a heartbeat. The physical reality there had been softened, eaten away, weakened from the other side. The far side of our reality, that we can never see. The very solidity of our world undermined from the other side, so they could break through. In that case, what came through was a supernatural meme, a curse or possession that spread like a virus, overwriting everyone it touched.
“We’re at Ground Zero, people; this isn’t just an invading army. A whole other reality is trying to break through and overwrite us, replace this world with their own. This door is less real than it should be because something else is becoming more real. The patient inside Ward 12A is being physically and spiritually remade into a doorway. But that takes a lot of power, which means it isn’t up to speed yet. We’ve still got some time.”
Dr. Benway looked at Julien. “Do you understand anything he’s saying?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” said Julien. “Are you sure about this, John?”
“Of course I’m not sure! This is all inspired guess-work! If you’ve got a better and less worrying idea, I for one would love to hear it!”
“Knew I should have kept you away from the brandy,” said Julien.
He leaned in close to study the steel door, almost but not quite pressing his nose against the metal. “The door is becoming permeable, all the strength and purpose being sucked right out of it, to help fuel the forming gateway. Which means we’re not locked outside after all.”
He pressed both of his hands against the door and pushed hard. His hands sank deep into the soft metal, disappearing up to the wrists. Julien’s face convulsed, lips skinning back from his teeth in a pained grimace. He pushed with all his strength, but the door wouldn’t budge. Julien gave up and tried to pull his hands back, then found that he couldn’t. Benway and I grabbed an arm each and threw our whole weight backwards; and Julien’s hands burst back out of the door with horrible, wet, sucking sounds. He staggered backwards, clutching his hands to his chest. Dr. Benway made him stand still while she checked them for damage, but apparently it was really bad pins and needles from returning circulation. The soft door had sucked all the living warmth right out of them.
“How the hell do we get in?” said Julien, through gritted teeth. “Blow a hole in the wall?”
“Amateur,” I said, not unkindly.
I raised my gift, focused on the door, and found the door-handle. My gift locked onto it, onto the basic reality of the door-handle itself, and forced it to be real and hard and solid. And then it was the easiest thing in the world for me to reach out, grasp the door-handle, and open the door. The locks and seals were as soft and weak as everything else now, and the door opened easily under my guiding will. The door started to swing inwards, then gave up its remaining ghost and fell apart into thick wisps of grey fog, already dispersing on the starkly lit air. I was left with only the door-handle in my hand. I carelessly let it drop to the floor and strode confidently into Ward 12A.
The whole room was full of flaring bright lights, sharp and incandescent, acutely painful to the human eye. Great clouds of flailing energies boiled this way and that, discharging violently against anything they touched. One whole wall had become wet and sticky, all the shades of red, pulsing like the insides of something alien. The ceiling seemed to be miles overhead, and the floor felt untrustworthy under my feet. Walking into the Ward was like pushing against a fierce wind, an almost solid intervention of some Outside will. I could feel Space itself stretched taut by some unimaginable influence. I stopped, despite myself, struggling to get my bearings. There were too many directions, too many dimensions inside Ward 12A now, too many ways to look, too many options to deal with. Another reality had been added to ours, superimposed on it, making the world heavier and more complex than it was ever supposed to be. The red wall was full of something like maggots, writhing and twisting. There were dark holes in the floor, dropping away forever. And rising over everything, a horrible feeling, a terrible conviction, that something was coming.
Far-away, from Outside or beyond our universe, I could hear something screaming, an endless howl of rage and hate. Drawing steadily, remorselessly closer.
And right there before me, hanging in mid air, was patient John Doe X 47, or what was left of him. His Humanity had been ripped away. His body was gone. He had been subtracted from the world and made into something else, and now he was a living tear in reality. A human gap, a human shape full of something that hurt my eyes to look at. A way in for whatever wanted in. I forced myself to look away, to check on what had happened to the other patients trapped in Ward 12A. I knew Julien would want to know. I could see all the beds, and the patients in them; but they all seemed far-away, distant, on the other side of the world. Looking across the Ward, across all its hideously stretched Space, was like looking across the universe. Trying to concentrate on the patients was like trying to look in a new direction, one I could sense but not make sense of. They’d been pushed aside by what was happening, forced out of the way to make room for what was pushing in. I was pretty sure the patients were still alive. But I couldn’t tell if they were still human any more.