instead of glass to reveal the coffin.
Standing in its equipage was a brown animal with fearsome, glaring eyes and purple drool dripping from its long, complex jaw. The jaw itself was metal, and appeared to be partially sprung, the way it dangled. The animal was smaller than a horse by half, but seemed made entirely of brown, wiry muscle, with the narrow, ever-twisting neck of a snake. When it saw them, it began to burp and stomp pointed, spikelike feet, which made it look as if it was dancing. Others just like it, pulling various wagons and carriages, moved up and down the street.
The door at the back of the wagon was open, and his captor made a brisk little gesture toward it and bowed. A twisted smile played on his almost lipless mouth, and his spiked teeth glittered in the brown light.
There was a hissing sound overhead, and he saw soaring past, a gorgeous green machine shaped like a horizontal teardrop with a gleaming windshield at the front of its perfectly streamlined shape. It was so different from the miserable mess in the street that it was hard to believe that it even belonged to the same world.
Then he got a terrific push, which caused him to bark his shins painfully against the edge of the wagon’s floor. He tried to turn toward his assailant, but a powerful blow brought whizzing confusion.
The door shut behind him with a dry clunk. For a moment, he could see nothing. As his eyes got used to the dimness, he examined the space he was in. It was like nothing so much as the interior of an old, zinc-lined ice chest. It was at most three feet high and five long. There were claw marks gouged in the roof and walls, and in the wooden floor, places—many of them—that had been gnawed.
He drew out the magnum, cradling it in his hand as he would the rarest diamond. This was hope.
He twisted himself around until he could see out one of the tiny, barred windows. They were not going up the great esplanade he had seen through Samson’s eyes, but along the city’s back streets. There were neon hieroglyphics everywhere, and flags overhead with more unreadable slogans on them. The place was ancient Egypt on steroids. Martin would have loved it, but he wasn’t the sucker on the spot, was he?
No, indeed, and the fear had a funny quality to it. The fear had to do with more of the knowledge he had gained. He had a soul. These people could take out your soul and put it in a damn glass tube. They could remove your memories and graft them into their own souls—eat them, as it were. They could use you for crap like running a car, and God only knew what else. In this place, the phrase the soul in the machine had a ghastly new meaning.
They went around the corner—the animal was not fast—and began to pass what appeared to be a restaurant. Behind the lighted windows, he could see gleaming red walls and a gold ceiling. Balls of light floating in midair provided illumination. Sitting in large chairs were seraphs in beautiful, shimmering suits, tight against their bodies.
Then he got what could probably and with accuracy be called the surprise of his life: there were human beings in there, too. As they trundled slowly past, he strained to see more. There was a man in a fur jacket and a white ermine fedora, not recognizable to him but obviously some kind of entertainer, maybe a rapper or rock star, there were women in silks and furs. Other men wore tuxedos, some business suits, others caftans and gallabias. Then he saw a cardinal, distinguished by the red zuchetto on his head and the red-trimmed black cassock.
On the tables before them were golden dishes beautifully decorated with garlands of greenery and white flowers. Heaped on them were roasted body parts, both seraph and human. The diners were eating busily.
Then it was gone, replaced by more of the endless gray city and its hurrying, oblivious hordes of seraph.
A stunned Wylie Dale sank down to the floor. For a time he lay there listening to the creak of the axles, feeling the steady swaying of the wagon. His blank mind held an image of that cardinal. Of the men in tuxedos, the women in evening gowns.
Who in the name of all that was holy WERE THEY?
Rich, to be sure, compared to the starved horde that crowded these streets. Human beings, movers and shakers all, living large in hell.
Or was that the whole answer? The seraph were chameleons. So maybe these weren’t human beings at all, but seraph spending time at home. Two-moon earth must have been plagued by them. It had totally ignored air pollution, and global warming was running wild there, even worse than at home.
Shape-shifted seraph had probably been running the place for centuries. They were the cardinals, the big personalities, the ministers and the kings. Like Samson. He’d ended up in control of the United States itself, and he was a shape-shifted repitilian seraph maintaining himself on drugs.
He wondered, Who in his own world might be a seraph in disguise? Who sought the ruin of souls? Who encouraged greed? Who lived by the lie that pollution didn’t matter?
Who, indeed?
He realized that he was not far from insanity, here. His mind just wanted to go inside itself. Walk in the green fields of dream, smell the flowers, above all shut this horrible world out, scrub his brain free of all knowledge of it and memory of it.
Every trembling cell of his body, every instinct that he had, every drop of his blood said the same thing: You are not supposed to know this, you are not supposed to be here, and you cannot get away, and to keep their secret, they are going to kill not just your body but your immortal soul.
But now that he had fallen into the trap, he must not freeze, he had to do everything possible to turn their trick back on them. He had to try.
Oh God, he prayed, what is the universe? How does it really work? Above all, how can I save this situation? A memory came to him of Martin and his ceaseless prayer, and he began to pray that way, also. He prayed to the healing hand that had raised Osiris after his brother had cut him to pieces, and Jesus after his passion had ended. The unseen one who bound the good by the cords of love.
They were arriving somewhere, the wagon turning, stopping. He looked out first one window and then the other, but saw only skeletal trees, huge once, no doubt rich with leaves and life, now gray and dead, clawing at the brown sky. “Mr. Dale, if you don’t mind?”
As Wylie came down, the creature added, “I was wondering if you’d autograph Alien Days for me?”
For the love of Pete, it had a paperback of the damn book and a pen in its clawed hand. Too stunned to do anything else, he took the book. Opened it to the title page. “Do you want me to personalize it?”
“Oh, hey, yeah. Make that out to me.”
Confused, he looked up, to find himself staring into a very human, and very familiar face—Senator Louis Bowles, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, senior senator from Utah.
Senator Bowles smiled, then shuddered and shifted back into a long-faced vampiric horror, its scales glistening, its eyes glaring with evil energy.
He finished the inscription—to Senator Bowles… and as he did so, saw the hand that was doing the writing, and then also the hand that was holding the book. He saw long, thin fingers of the palest tan, ending in black claws, neatly manicured.
He saw the wrists where they were visible outside the sleeves of his jacket. Narrow, scaled, shimmering with the gemstone sheen of snake-skin. He looked at the hand that held his Mont Blanc, turned it over, watching the light play on the scales. Then he raised his fingers to his cheek, and felt beneath their tips the delicate shudder of more scales.
He hadn’t come to an alien earth at all.
He was a shape-shifter himself.
He had come home.
PART FOUR
The Blue Light
He found the blue light, and made her a signal to draw him up again. She did draw him up, but when he came near the edge, she stretched down her hand and wanted to take the blue light away from him. “No,” said he, perceiving her evil intention, “I will not give you the light until I am standing with both feet upon the ground.” The
