“We call them whispers,” Chang said, his voice cutting through my growing horror. “Just snippets of soul that haven’t quite made it to the Deadlands, trapped in some sort of space between here and there. The doctor and I were never able to quantify. Ignore them—they can’t hurt you.”
“Can’t we do something?” I said. The screams raked across my ears like claws, until I would have done anything to make them stop.
“No,” Chang said, turning a final dial. “They’re lost to us. Nobody can reach them. Neither in the Deadlands nor any other world. They’re little more than echoes, really.”
The record spun faster, the needle cutting into the wax, saving the whispers’ words for posterity.
Chang checked his levels and then nodded to me. “Go ahead,” he said loudly, over the crying and wailing. “If you still want to.”
I’d never wanted anything less, but I also didn’t want to show my fear to Chang and the others. I unscrewed the vial quickly and tilted it to my lips. The glass rim was cold, like a snowflake landing on my tongue.
The poison itself tasted horrible, like something left buried in the ground for a long time, then dug up and fermented. It coated my tongue with a sick flavor and sent a feverish heat down my throat.
I gagged as I swallowed, and to my horror couldn’t stop gagging. My airway closed off and the most horrible spasms shot through my stomach. I did panic then, trying to stand, and knocking Chang’s control panel askew.
“Help me,” he snapped at Cal, who ran to my side and pinned my arms down.
I was dying, there was no doubt about it. I could feel each piece of me shutting down and drifting away as the pain intensified, replacing all thoughts and feelings except panic.
But this was the way it had to be, for me and for Dean. For everything.
Chang laid me flat on the wooden plank near the machine and started hooking leads to me. I saw the long flash of an IV needle but didn’t feel it pierce my skin. I couldn’t feel anything now, could see nothing but the purple glow of the Tesla coil.
“She’s convulsing!” Cal cried. I could barely distinguish his voice from the whispers, which had gotten so loud I thought they might split my skull. “Do something!”
“Nothing to do,” Chang said. “She’s got to die for this to work.”
Something flickered in and out of my vision, and I saw a woman in the sort of garb Lei had worn when she was trying to scam us standing over me, reaching for me, her nails jagged and the tips of her fingers bloody. Oh, help me, she hissed. I’m so alone, so afraid.… They buried me there, all alone.…
I tried to scream, but it died in my throat as I became aware that the woman wasn’t the only person in the room. The machine was surrounded by black and silver figures, all of them wavering as if they were underwater. The whispers had bodies, bodies a living person couldn’t perceive.
The pitch of the machine’s whine increased, and I felt my last breath slip out of me as if a piece of silk had drifted through my fingers.
The whispers turned to look at me, and the woman who’d spoken reached out to grab my hair.
A small boy, also wearing traditional Chinese garb, stopped her. “No, Mama,” he said, looking at me with the same blank, bleeding eyes as the girl on Alcatraz. “She’s not staying here.”
The whispers converged on me, grabbing at my clothes and hair, trying to touch my face, and I lashed out, trying to fight them.
The pain had stopped, and I could move, but I felt as if I were drugged, moving slow and dull, not nearly at my usual speed.
In the center of the machine, between the coils, I saw a small fissure of the same black and silver light the whispers seemed to be made out of, and I tried to shove my way through them toward it.
Don’t leave us! the woman screamed. Don’t go away like the man!
That made me stop struggling for a moment. “Man? What man?”
Mama, stop, said the boy. The man didn’t stay. She won’t stay. She’ll go on to the Deadlands and we’ll still be here.
The fissure widened and arched into the shape I recognized, the tiny tear in space-time that Gateminders could perceive when they traveled from place to place. Now that I was dead, I could perceive the one to the Deadlands as well.
I tried to move again, and the whispers relaxed their hold this time, but when I took the first step, something hit my chest as if I’d been struck with a bat.
Chang had started trying to bring me back. I moved again, trying to fight against the blows Chang was raining on my physical body as he tried to resuscitate me.
My fingers grazed the fissure in the fabric of this in-between place, and I felt as if I had been sucked into a whirlpool. There was no free will involved in this at all—I touched it, and the Deadlands dragged me down.
There wasn’t the usual tug of the Gates, the feeling of being spread across the universe, my mind and body a million glittering points of light. This felt like sinking, like I was drowning in the deepest of oceans, powerless to do anything other than watch as I drifted down through the silver-gray fog, into a place no human eye had ever touched.
I saw other faces, other shapes, in the fog. More of the whispers, who hissed and gnashed their teeth and tried to grab for me, and other, larger things.
One turned an eye on me, sightless and cloudy, and if I’d had breath I would have gasped.
It looked like the Old Ones looked to my eyes, great star-sized bodies that held universes of their own under their translucent skin, drifting tentacles that brushed through galaxies, eyes like suns that burned you to the core.
But this one was small, and broken, and floated before me as if it, too, had drowned and was dead.
You came, it whispered to me. You shouldn’t have.
“I had no choice,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was talking or we were speaking in some other, more primal way that transcended voice and language.
That’s what the other said, the Old One told me. The one who came before.
“The doctor,” I said. “I know who he is.”
Not the sad soul who fears death. The other, said the Old One. The one touched by our gift, before you. He came here, for the same answers you seek.
The thing had to be talking about Tesla. But it couldn’t be. Tesla had built the Gates, but he’d never spoken of that part of his life to anyone except the Brotherhood.
“You’re lying,” I told the Old One, as we drifted through the silver. The cold increased. Below us, I saw a black whorl, toward which everything in this in-between place was slowly drawn. A whisper wavered at the edge, and then broke apart into a thousand blots of darkness and disappeared.
I am old beyond knowing. I cannot lie. I speak only what is true, the Old One said.
“I’m not here for you,” I tried to explain. I was done acting as the tool of beings older and more powerful than myself. All that mattered was Dean.
But you are here for us, it said. You are our agent, our herald in the Iron Land, whether you like it or not. You, Destroyer, and your vast gift are the harbinger of the wind that will sweep the world clean, just as the one before you was. And you have no choice in the matter, just as he had none. You will pave the way for our return, or you will perish. It is a simple truth, even for one as primitive as you.
“Leave me alone!” I screamed. It couldn’t be true. I’d made the bargain with the Old Ones out of desperation, not because I was fated to. Nothing in my life was predetermined. Everything that had brought me here had been my doing, my choice.