In his blundering, Skip had finally intercepted a well-trodden path that led uphill toward the spooky chanting sound that he’d been listening to for some time without actually hearing it-or was it the other way around?
Didn’t matter. All that mattered now was following the path until it opened out onto a rocky, arrowhead- shaped bluff where his new friends sat in a semicircle with their backs to him, chanting
The western sky was streaked with every red, yellow, and orange color in the Crayola box-the big box-and the air was still and green as Skip crossed the bluff and knelt behind the massive, white-clad figure in the middle of the semicircle. “Glad you could make it,” Oliver said over his shoulder as the others continued the chant. “Where’s Ed?”
“Dead,” Skip whispered urgently, his voice sounding slow and wobbly in his ears, like a half-melted audiotape. “Asmador shot him with an arrow. We need to get everybody out of here right now.”
“Calm down, son,” whispered Oliver. Then, louder, “It’s all right, everybody. Just keep chanting while Skip and I have a chat.” He rose so nimbly from his half-lotus position that he appeared to have levitated, took Skip firmly by the elbow, and led him away from the others. “Now listen to me, Skip,” he said, gently, insistently. “You need to know that you’ve taken some LSD and you’re probably having some hallucinations.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“
“I hear you, Skip,” said Oliver. “I want you to know I hear you, and I understand the danger
“Luke Sweet.”
Under other circumstances, Oliver’s jaw-dropping, eye-popping double take would have been comical. “Luke Sweet?”
However long it took for Skip to get the whole story out (by then the whole concept of time seemed like a bad joke the universe had decided to play upon the human race), when he’d finished, Oliver nodded decisively, turned on his sandaled heels, and hurried back to the semicircle of sunset chanters.
“What about you, O?” Stahl seemed to realize that something was wrong-but then, he was tripping his freakin’ brains out, too. They all were.
“Skip and I will catch up,” Oliver said reassuringly.
“Catch up, we will?” whispered Skip, channeling Yoda for some reason. The color was beginning to drain from the sky; the trainees were wandering about, dazedly gathering up their things.
Oliver shrugged. “You did say we’re the ones this Asmador is after, didn’t you? No sense putting the others in jeopardy along with us.”
Skip was impressed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I know, that’s my job.” Oliver rested his smooth, pink hand on Skip’s shoulder. “It’s a shepherd thing.”
By then, the two were alone on the bluff-Oliver’s flock had disappeared into the woods, scampering blithely down the trail Skip had just come up, and singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in a ragged round. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream…
Last out were George and Candace; between them they were hauling Steve Stahl by the arms. His body was limp, his bare heels were scraped and bleeding from dragging the rocky ground, and sticking out from the chest of his royal blue shirt was an aluminum shaft with feathers on one end and blood on the other.
9
The shortcut, obviously, had been a success. Asmador had regained the marked trail a quarter mile below the sign pointing to the Omphalos, long before the humans could possibly have reached it. To make sure, he’d knelt to examine the tracks again, and had been pleased to discover that those few footprints that could still be distinguished in the trampled dirt all pointed uphill.
By then, the sun was working Technicolor wonders in the west. The sky in that direction, what little Asmador had been able to see of it through the leafy canopy, had turned pink, shot through with bloody streaks of crimson. Nearer the ground the air seemed to have taken on an eerie goblin green glow. He’d marched on, lightly tapping the ground with the springy, curved tip of the bow every few steps, while chanting the names of the Infernal Council:
Hearing the sound of human voices a little farther up the trail, Asmador had ducked off the side of the path to count them off as they hiked by. There’d been twelve altogether, ten in orange bracketed by two in blue. But no Oliver and no Epstein. Turning his back on the trail, Asmador had plunged deeper into the woods, circling downhill in his stealthy half crouch until he’d cut ahead of the humans again. Then he’d showed himself, stepping into the middle of a straight, tunnel-like stretch of trail and assuming the classic archer’s position.
The blue shirt in the lead had braked and spread his arms wide to shield the ones behind him with his body. “Let’s turn around, troopers,” he’d called calmly over his shoulder. “Candy, take them-”
Asmador still wasn’t sure whether he had released the arrow or it had released itself. Either way, it had felt
And now it is nearly dark under the trees; the undersides of the leaves are black against the violet gray of the sky. Asmador shucks off his backpack, returns the unused arrow to the quiver, and rummages around for the night- vision goggles. It takes him a few minutes to figure out how to work them. There are two switches, one to activate the goggles and the other to turn on the narrow infrared beam mounted above the eyepieces, which focus like binoculars. He soon gets the hang of it, though, and sets off up the trail again, following the bobbing neon green shaft of light up the glowing neon green tunnel, and taking up the singsong chant where he’d left off earlier:
