Leaving the mist-shrouded formations of Smoke Den for the civilized land called January Slash, the five espers returned to their routine of travel by darkness and sleep by day. The nearest Pure enclave was the Jinyi Fortress, far to the north of the province, beyond the Hadaspuri Sea, and none of the tainted folk in this region appeared to be aware that esper fugitives might be crossing their land. This should have been, with minimal precautions, a time of peace for the travelers, a time to renew their strength to face more rugged obstacles ahead. Instead they found themselves growing more agitated by the day, partly because the land was parched and sandy and hardly fit for human habitation, and partly because their sleep was ruined every night by the intrusion of dreams they did not understand and for which they had no explanations.
Jask was the first to dream, on the first night after they departed the field of black glass. His visions were filled with places, people, and concepts that were utterly alien to him. Time and again, he woke, sitting straight up beside Melopina, a scream caught in his throat. He could never remember what the genesis of his terror had been, though it was profound enough to leave him shaking each time. Drifting back into sleep, he would pick up the dreams again, follow them through to the penultimate moment of unknown terror…
The following night Melopina dreamed as well, whimpering in her sleep so loudly that she wakened Kiera, who tried but failed to comfort her.
On the third night no one was spared the dreams.
In the morning, exhausted, they sat around a meager breakfast and discussed the vision they had somehow received: a vast city composed of living tissue, a pulsing mass of inhuman flesh that shaped itself to the needs of the millions who lived within it, a many-armed but stationary behemoth fully a hundred and fifty kilometers from end to end, containing five hundred levels of living space. Its streets were of living fiber, like bloodless veins that connected its many rooms, amphitheaters, auditoriums, shops, schools, churches, factories, entertainment centers and private homes. It grew where its citizens felt it needed to grow, provided water and electricity through its own metabolic processes. Though mindless, it contained an enormous brain, as large as an enclave fortress, which controlled its highly specialized functions.
Could any such creature have existed? Melopina 'pathed.
I've read a number of prewar books that survived the holocaust, Tedesco said. But I've never encountered mention of a living city. He considered a moment. However, there are many other things I know to exist that I never encountered mention of in those books.
Chaney 'pathed, It seems to me that the question of the living city's existence is not our major concern. What should interest us now is why we have all, simultaneously, begun to dream of it.
They weighed various possibilities and rejected all of them.
They continued their march north.
During the fourth sleeping period the dreams grew more intense, more urgent, as if they carried some message that must be understood.
No one, however, understood that message.
Jask had forgotten the unseen entity that he had been certain was trying to contact them in the Black Glass craters. He was more consumed by the current mystery of the dreams than by the older mystery of the silent creature that might or might not have been a figment of his imagination. On the sixth day, however, he came to understand that both phenomena were part of the same puzzle. He woke from the familiar dream at that point where it somehow metamorphosed into nightmare, and he instantly recognized the unseen being's presence — a distant fuzziness, a straining power, an urgency that had no outlet.
He told the others that he felt they had been approached by some invisible entity in the craters and that it had followed them. The dreams were its only successful attempts to establish contact.
The Black Presence? Tedesco 'pathed.
As I said before, this creature would not seem to be intelligent in the sense the Presence would have to be. It lacks order, coordination. If it were the Black Presence, it could contact us easily with its superior esp abilities.
But it must have some telepathic talent! Witness these awful dreams, Kiera 'pathed. She gnashed her pretty teeth in a show of dislike for the visions.
They could reach no conclusions.
By the tenth day out of the Smoke Den all of them could sense the straining nearness of the creature, could feel it drifting at the rim of their extrasensory perception, completely beyond the ken of their normal five senses.
Knowing it was there did nothing to suppress its emanations.
The five espers continued to sleep less than they would have liked, shocked awake again and again from the brink of that ultimate, unspeakable horror, which despite its vividness in dreams was never made quite clear enough to be remembered out of sleep.
They entered the Divide of Cessius, which marked the lower third of January Slash. They crossed its black- and-red marble floor, wending their way between the hundreds of upthrust steel spikes that dotted it, climbed its far wall and came out on the other side, into more sand and cactus.
The dreams continued.
At the edge of the desert they came upon the Vast Remains, the largest known ruins of prewar origins, wound through its blasted streets, past buildings that had fallen but had once stood two thousand meters high. They slept in the shadows of cylindrical buildings that had no entrances or windows; these monoliths still thrummed within and radiated a gentle heat by night, as a byproduct of some other, inexplicable task, filled by pointlessly functioning machinery that had been sealed against the ravages of time. They crossed the inner-city canals, which were filled with blood — or at least with some fluid that quite resembled ichor. They passed scattered robots that still stumbled through their programmed chores, oblivious of the end of their world and of the specterlike five who walked past them in the purple darkness.
And the dreams continued.
Having crossed the Vast Remains in less than a week, they camped by a clean brook, beneath a monstrous, mutated elm— the countryside having changed from its desert motif — and hoped that the ruins might somehow form a barrier between their unknown guest and themselves. All of them badly needed a good day's sleep.
As they lay beneath the gnarled elm, however, the unseen being pressed itself upon them more vigorously than ever: Melopina woke, crying out, with the feeling that some creature had hold of her and was pressing her down into the earth…
She kicked at it.
She flailed the air and snarled in fear.
She gasped for her breath. Jask could see that she was really having some trouble getting it, as if someone were choking her.
Mellie…?
Help me!
Jask bent over her and, as he touched her face to feel for a fever, he felt the… thing rise from her. A cold, damp force pushed over him, lingering long enough for him to recognize that distant psychic fuzziness, was gone without a trace.
When she had explained how it had felt, a formless mass of invisible flesh crushed into her, they discussed this new development.
It's getting bolder, whatever it is, Tedesco 'pathed.
Perhaps my grave robbing is finally being punished, Chaney 'pathed. Maybe this is the spirit of one of my victims, come to torture us.
No one laughed. They were willing to consider any possibility.
By the time they reached the abandoned port of Kittlesticks on the Hadaspuri Sea, they had all experienced physical contact — or something quite similar — with their unwanted companion. It approached them boldly now, while they were sleeping or while they were awake, as if it wished desperately to tell them something, to impart the essentials of a tale, an ethereal Ancient Mariner full of its own history of curses, calms and death.
The five espers walked through the cobbled streets of Kittlesticks, which was little more than a thousand years old but which had been abandoned more than eight centuries ago. Its inhabitants had reported that the ghosts of Indians could be seen in the streets at night, slinking from shadowed door to shadowed door and that in
