be. I drew an invisible blade down the strands.
They popped apart and before the cut had extended to my stomach, the whole web disappeared.
'That your best shot?' I taunted Mycroft, displaying a cockiness I didn't altogether feel.
The unseen sledge hammer that punched me out into the hallway again told me he'd only just started. I lay against the back door, winded and vowing to watch my lip in future. The pain came from my shoulders, though, where they'd struck the door, and not from my chest where I imagined I'd been hit.
Pushing myself up, I ran back into the round room, colliding with Synergists who were making a break for it, fear finally overcoming loyalty to their leader. They flinched away from me as though I were a plague carrier, hurrying back into the room. I had to admit I couldn't blame them for trying to escape, because it was a decidedly unhealthy place to be. If Midge hadn't been in there, I'd have cut and run myself.
The floorboards were ripping through the carpet, curling upward as though sucked by a whirlwind; even the ceiling was becoming bowed, dome-shaped. Long, jagged cracks were striping the walls.
Lightning streaked from Mycroft's cane toward my heart and reflexively I blocked it with a thought. And then sent it back.
His cane exploded, burning shards flying into the air. He staggered backward and almost fell. But recovered and stared at me with a mixture of astonishment and terrible hatred. The apprentice had shaken the master, I mused grimly.
Then he showed me things I don't want to see—or
He unzipped a nightmare and shoved me through. I was no longer inside Gramarye but was somewhere else, in another dimension that was gloomy and limitless, where rot and decay were fragrance, where pain and suffering were succor. A dark plain where loathing replaced loving, where obscenity substituted for purity. I don't know if he'd slipped me through the side door of hell, or had led me down a lost corridor inside my own mind. Maybe they were both the same thing.
All I knew was that unless I retreated from this underworld where horror shuffled in the darkness around me, unless I found my way back within moments, then here I'd stay forever. It had something to do with the relinquishment of my own will.
I saw a mass lumbering toward me from the shadows, a mass that I thought was an advancing mob, saw their legs hobbling forward, outlines of waving arms, a bobbing head here and there; but when they drew close I realized they were just one burned mass of people, fused together by a fire that had melted their flesh into each other's. I saw a river that flowed through the air over my head, creatures inside its putrid waters that were neither fish nor man, but partly both; they fed upon each other, choosing one in a pack to ostracize then devour. I saw reptilian things that slithered over the black-ash earth, and when they drew near they were merely membrane sacks filled with a multitude of wriggling forms, different species of worms, grubs and insects all sharing the same transparent shell, their own restlessness causing the movement of the whole. I saw shapes of monsters that defied description, I absorbed thoughts too despicable to relate. I existed in a sullen and tenebrous nether region whose very hideousness had its own allure.
Something slimy cold coiled around my ankle and I screamed.
And before the scream had died on my lips, Midge's voice brought me back to my proper world, bizarre and chaotic though it had become.
I didn't know how she'd got away from Kinsella, but there she was, shaking me, pounding my chest, jolting me from that other dimension, bringing me back from somewhere deep inside myself, a dark and secret place that lies within us all.
She stopped bullying me only when recognition dawned in my eyes; she buried her head against me.
'Oh, Mike, Mike, I was so scared! It wasn't you standing here—for a moment it was just an empty shell, there was no life!'
I hugged her, relief turning into elation—the feeling you might get after surviving a horrendous accident; the haunting dread of what might have been would come later.
Although I'd been mistaken about Midge's role in events leading to this moment, I realized again that she'd had a major part to play: she was certainly a catalyst, but not the kind I'd thought; she had always been the motivator for me, the link between myself and Flora Chaldean—the intermediary who had brought me to Gramarye. She had her own special goodness. I moved her aside.
Mycroft had backed away against the mantelshelf, and dust was still billowing from the fireplace below, sweeping upward to form a sooty mist around him. How could I ever have described his appearance as bland? With his baleful eyes and his shoulders hunched, hands held in front of him like claws, his mouth a downward grimace and face, now etched with lines where there had been none before, smeared by the dust—Jesus, he looked like a resident of the nightmare I'd just left.
He was failing, though, his bag of tricks had so far come to nothing; and he obviously found that hard to take. Yeah, it's true to say he looked not only disheveled, but deranged too. I liked that: I was sick of his smugness. But there was life in the bastard yet.
He waved his hands and created a wall of vermin between us, their bristling, filth-haired bodies literally forming the brickwork (did I mention before?—I
More panic among the Synergists—they didn't care for the image either.
The wall toppled when I pictured a demolition ball hurtling into it, and the rats scurried in all directions, fading before they reached cover.
I smiled at him, ignoring the turmoil around me.
He split the air in front of me so that a widening rent of absolute nothingness appeared; a fierce wind endeavored to suck me into the void.
I sealed the opening with imaginary stitches.
'I'm younger than her, Mycroft!' I shouted across at him, and he knew I meant Flora. 'I can take all the stress and strain you put my way. Young and fresh to all this, you see! It doesn't hurt a bit!'
Would I never learn? I stepped back when some of those things I thought I'd left behind in the nether region began crawling from the holes created in the floor. Carpet was ripping explosively all around me, and sluglike monsters oozed over the edges in shiny slimes. Hands that were scabbed and dripping pus clawed at the frayed carpet in an effort to drag the rest of their forms out into the open. Those membranes, full of wriggling life, quivered their snouts in the air before curling over the edge. Wispy black smoke tendrils drifted up in lazy spirals, and these were full of diseased microorganisms, the corrupting evil that roamed the depths, subversives that searched for ways to surface, intent on finding exposure, definition—
I sagged, went down onto my knees, because their existence depended on me also; I was their source, and they sapped my strength.
Kinsella was on his knees too, close to one of the growing holes, hands clasped between his thighs (now I understood how Midge had got away from him) and the thing that had coiled around my ankle when I'd been lost in that brief but eternal nightmare of my lower mind was reaching from the opening and circling his.
He shrieked and beat hard at the glistening cord with his fists. It shrank away, retreating into its pit, and Kinsella pushed himself on hands and knees across the room, blubbering as he went.
Shapes were emerging that even Mycroft seemed afraid and in awe of; they were muddied and grimed, as if squeezed from the earth that was beneath the round room.
Wind rushed by me, catching my hair and clothes; others around the room were falling, wailing, clutching those near them for mutual support. The electric glows were more intense, as though radiation hot. Furniture was rising, books flew across the room. Midge's drawing easel smashed itself and a Synergist—I think it was Bone Man, I'm sure it was the Bone Man—against a wall.
And now the walls were cracking apart.
A body thudded down next to me, and suddenly Midge was pulling my face around to look at hers.
