Most of them had lifted their feet from the floor, and were floating in the air.
Crawford noticed that each right hand, whether that member was a tight bunch of flesh like pink broccoli or was a cluster of long tentacles, now gripped a gun or a sword; and he realized that all the different shapes and sizes of eyes were focussed on him.
As if a load of bird-shot had been fired at a stretched rubber sheet, the holes of all the mouths opened simultaneously in all the faces. “Get out of here,” they chorused, speaking Italian with a thick German accent. “Whoever you are, you are well advised to leave.”
“You don’t recognize me?” asked Crawford with fatalistic bravado. “Look closely,” he added to the man whose two eyes were still growing—at the expense of the body, which had shrivelled up and was now hanging under the suspended globes as its shoes and clothing dropped one by one to the floor. “I’m Michael Aickman.”
All the varieties of left hands were raised in the air and hideously flexed. “Aickman!” croaked and whistled all the voices. “Biting the hand that fed you?”
Crawford tucked the presently useless pistol into his belt, then took Josephine’s free hand and walked forward.
A bell rang somewhere to Crawford’s right, and a moment later the high double doors at the far end of the room were swung open and several Austrian soldiers burst into the room.
Crawford noticed that even as they entered the soldiers looked frightened and desperate; and when they saw the warping and swelling bodies moving slowly through the air like diseased fish in a vast aquarium, they simply screamed and ran back out of the room. The doors were dragged closed, and the boom of a bolt being shot shook the air and rippled the floating bodies.
“Evidently the blood between the columns has cooled,” calmly observed all the stretched or puckered mouths. “They’ll spill more, Aickman, at any moment, and in the restored determinacy field these bodies will resume their solidity. Go while you can.”
“We can ignore the guns,” Crawford told Josephine quietly, and together they stepped forward.
The floating bodies thrust awkwardly gripped swords at them, but even Josephine with her dagger was able to knock them away. Some of the twisted hands were able to pull the triggers of their pistols, but the hammers snapped down quietly on the inert powder.
The bodies were becoming more distorted with every passing second, like clouds or smoke rings. “Wait,” said the mouths that were still capable of forming words. “I’m willing to … call it a draw, a stalemate. If you leave now, I’ll see to it that you two, and anyone else you designate, will be left alone by the nephelim.”
“For the rest of our lives, no doubt,” said Crawford, still pushing his way forward through the insubstantial crowd, with Josephine audibly parrying blades beside him. He heard the clang of several swords hitting the marble floor, released by hands too stretched to continue holding them.
“For eternity,” replied the mouths.
Crawford didn’t answer. He took three more limping strides, and glimpsed through the warping forms a nude figure lying in a glass case against the right-hand wall.
He began angling toward it, making sure not to get separated from Josephine and being careful to clang the weakly obstructing swords out of the way. All around him he heard the clicks of pistol hammers falling into impotent flashpans.
Only a few of the mouths were still capable of producing human sounds now, but the ones that could laughed heartily. “I never anticipated someone being able to free, and then catch, the eye,” they chorused. “I should have anticipated it—Perseus did it, after all. And I should have had braver human guards, or even blind ones. Still, it doesn’t matter.”
“No, it doesn’t matter,” came a different voice from overhead, and when
Crawford looked up he thought for a moment that the winged stone lion from the clock tower had left its post and was now clinging to the wall, head down.
It wasn’t until Josephine weakly said “Polidori …” that he recognized the gray face below the long, winged body.
A stone wing swept out to each side, throwing a gust of wind that Crawford knew must have swirled all the von Aargau duplicates to homogenous ribbons, and then the stony mouth creaked open and the claws retracted from the holes they had punched in the marble wall, and the thing that had been Polidori sprang.
It sprang toward Josephine—and in the instant when it was launched Crawford remembered the way it had tried to smash her against the pavement in front of the Casa Magni four nights ago, and in one flash he remembered too an overturned boat in gray surf and a burning house and a destroyed body in a bed—and he threw himself at her almost joyfully, slamming her out of the thing’s way and falling where she had been standing.
A blast of air hit him and bounced his chin off the marble floor, but the impact against which he was cringing didn’t come; he rolled over and saw that the creature had stopped its dive and flown out into the high reaches of the room, setting the chandeliers swinging with the wind of its wings. The false von Aargaus were now just slivers whirling in the air, and all their clothing was scattered across the floor.
Josephine had fallen to her knees, but was looking over her shoulder at Crawford, and her eyes were wide with wonder and gratitude.
The winged thing flapped down to the floor, and for several seconds Crawford hoped it was undergoing the same loss of form that the von Aargau duplicates had suffered—its wings broke noisily and folded into the white body, which tilted upright and began to narrow in the middle, and its forepaws stretched, separating into fingers. The face was rapidly narrowing, and he heard the snap as the more slowly shrinking jaw was dislocated.
But it stopped warping itself, and stood up and faced him and Josephine, and his heart sank to see that it had taken the form of Julia, Crawford’s long-dead wife.
“Look at me, Josephine,” said Julia’s mouth. “Look at me and relax.”
“Don’t listen to it,” Crawford wheezed, hiking himself up on one elbow, “don’t look into its eyes …”
But Josephine already had, and was staring into the eyes of the thing that still had power over her.
“Who am I, Josephine?”
“You’re …Julia.”
The woman figure nodded and walked forward, smiling. “My poor little sister! Look at your hand, and your eye! What have they done to you?”
Josephine lowered her head jerkily and held up her skeletal arms. She looked as inorganic as the bronze men on the clock tower, and the knife she still clutched in her hand looked as if it had been cast with her arm. “They’ve,” she said in a rusty voice, “taken away nearly all of my flesh.”
“Did you want them to?”
Josephine shook her head, and Crawford bared his teeth in empathic pain to see the tears in her eyes. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I couldn’t have … wanted it, though, could I?”
“They’ve used you up,” the shape of her sister said.
“Yes. They’ve used me up.”
“You’ve always wanted to be me,” said the Julia-thing. “You can have it now.” Its tone was infinitely comforting. “You can be me.” It took another couple of steps, and was now standing in front of Josephine. Its smile was radiant, and even for Crawford it evoked dim memories of the house in Bexhill-on-Sea.
“I have always wanted to be you,” Josephine said softly. “But …”
The thing was reaching out white hands toward her. “But what, dear?”
Josephine took a deep breath.
And the dagger lashed forward so quickly that the thing had no chance to get out of the way, and to Crawford it looked as though the obstruction of the hilt was all that prevented Josephine from driving her fist right through the figure.