So entranced was he by the performance and the effect it was having on the Spinner that he was unaware he was rocking back and forth in time to the music. Unaware, that is, until he felt Flucca tugging anxiously on his wrist.
He’d been asleep while awake. Now he frowned down at the smaller man, who turned and pointed back toward the canyon.
The narrow slit of light was no longer visible as a bright dividing line between the towering cliffs. Now only darkness lived there, intensifying as he stared. A rumbling began to sound in his ears, in his bones.
The others noticed it as well. Mouse looked worriedly back over her shoulder even as she continued with her song. Frank didn’t have to ask the significance of the advancing darkness.
Relentlessly pursuing across alternate realities, the Anarchis had finally caught up with them.
"Will she finish the song in time?" he muttered aloud, trying to divide his attention among the trio, his wife, and the oncoming nightmare.
"She has to," said Flucca. "As I understand it, if she’s interrupted before her therapy’s been completed, then all our efforts will have been for nothing. I don’t see how this Anarchis could do harm to anything the size of the Spinner, but it doesn’t have to. All it has to do is stop the healing process."
Frank turned away from the singers to study the canyon that formed the outside tip of the Vanishing Point. Only the narrow confines prevented the Anarchis from advancing faster. It had to compact itself, squeeze down to fit through.
"I guess we’ve got to stop it."
Frank’s lower jaw dropped as he regarded Flucca. "We?" The dwarf was already racing for the motor home. Frank fought to catch up with him. "What are we supposed to do? Throw rocks at it?"
"We have to try something. We have to buy as much time as we can."
"Maybe we can reason with it."
Flucca was shaking his head as he mounted the steps. "Can’t reason with an agent of Chaos. That’s a contradiction in terms."
"The story of my life." He piled in behind the little man.
Flucca scrambled into the passenger’s seat. This time it didn’t feel so good to be sitting behind the wheel, but Frank knew his friend was right. They had to try and slow their unreasoning nemesis, had to give Mouse as much time as possible to complete her work. He wondered if Alicia had seen him leave. The warmth she projected was as vital to the Spinner’s therapy as the music. Just as well if she didn’t notice his absence. But it would’ve been nice to have had a chance to say good-bye.
"Maybe we can slow the damn thing down, or at least give it a bellyache," he growled as he started the engine. "If it doesn’t like reality, a few tons of Detroit iron oughta give it pause."
The wondrous music of the trio continued to reach their ears through the motor home’s walls, raising their spirits as it soothed the Spinner. Frank swung the motor home around, raced the engine, and then slammed his foot on the accelerator. No dragster, the Winnebago picked up speed gradually, but in a couple of minutes it was thundering toward the canyon at a very respectable velocity and gaining more every second. Whatever it struck would know it had been hit.
He wondered if they’d make contact inside the Vanishing Point or out in the real world, and if it would make a difference. His fingers tightened on the wheel. Probably wasn’t his world out there, anyway. In his world the Pacific hadn’t invaded the land and monsters didn’t run rampant in the streets of Los Angeles. Despite the gravity of the moment, he found he could still grin. Not south of Sunset Boulevard they didn’t, anyway.
Flucca kept an eye out for possible obstacles, rocks or logs. There were none on the perfectly flat plateau. There was only grass and flowers, which sprang back with unnatural vigor in the wake of the motor home’s heavy tires.
They could see the Anarchis squeezing through the Vanishing Point, like black toothpaste boiling out of its tube. It was driving a swirling cloud of terrified hummingbirds and little people before it. As they neared the roiling mass, Frank was able to identify individual shapes held tightly within. There were the devils and demons from Hades Junction, off to the side the shifting hulks of the alien thugs who’d tried to steal Burnfingers Begay’s precious gold at Pass Regulus, and behind them the armed and raging mutants from the fringes of a nuked Salt Lake City. Mixed in and among these more familiar evils were the killers and gargoyles, which had frolicked amid an inundated Los Angeles.
It rolled toward them, expanding as it emerged from the canyon. Bulging eyes and barbed tongues flared from its surface, as unstable and everchanging as the Chaos that was its master.
"I’m only sorry you never got the chance to taste my cooking," Flucca murmured solemnly.
"Yeah, me too." Frank closed his eyes. Good-bye, Alicia. Good-bye, Wendy. Good-bye, Steven, wherever you are.
Plowing into the center of the writhing black storm, the motor home scattered teeth and eyeballs, mutants and devils in every direction. Frank’s eyes opened involuntarily, to reveal that they were driving through a substance like thin tar. Then the Anarchis began to recover from the shock of being struck by so much relentless reality. Evil and darkness closed tight around them, thick as molasses. They could no longer hear Mouse’s exhilarating song.
Sly tendrils of night began to ooze into the motor home, seeping through imperfect joints, working their way beneath the weather stripping that lined the windows. The bubble of reality that had held back tons of seawater was unable to halt the invasion.
Frank wrenched at the wheel with one hand as he used the other to swat at the cloying darkness. Maybe they could swing clear and come around for another run. The darkness recoiled from his flailing hand like a live thing, insubstantial tentacles searching for just the right opening. Flucca fought the feral probes with a frying pan.
The motor home rumbled clear of the cloud, evil trailing behind like a clinging black contrail. Swinging around, Frank saw between coughs that they’d slowed but not stopped its advance. Mouse and the others continued with their song as though oblivious to the danger crawling across the plateau toward them.
"Hang on!" Frank yelled.
For a second time they smashed into the storm front that was the Anarchis. This time it was ready for them. Penetration came faster, the tendrils reached for them without hesitation. Frank thought the smoke laughed, a hideous, unpleasant chuckle. Coils of it encircled his arms, then his wrists. Another that had slipped up through the heating elements contracted around the foot he kept resolutely jammed to the accelerator.
He tried to bring the heavy vehicle around for a third attack, but he could feel himself losing control. Hands were firmly disengaged from the wheel as his foot was lifted from the gas pedal. Flucca made a dive for it, only to run headlong into a wall of dark, pulsing smoke.
A thin tendril wrapped itself round his forehead and dipped down to arc up his left nostril. Frank coughed, tried to choke it out, knew instinctively that if it crept down inside it would fill his lungs and throat with unbreathable horror. He cut through it with the edge of one hand only to see it re-form instantly.
The light inside the motor home was going out, together with the light that was his life. He hoped only that he and Flucca had bought the others enough time to complete the work.
Drifting through the darkness came a dinner plate. It had eyes and stripes, though whether it was black with white stripes or black on white he couldn’t tell. Lack of oxygen was impairing his vision. As it drew near he added fins and tail to his final catalogue of proximate observations.