That voice again, echoing, splintering, bouncing around like a ball. “No… it’s okay okay… the rope it ends just a few feet from me like… like it’s broken… then it starts up again above me or below me… I can’t be sure,” he called back to them. His voice sounded fragile, like it was shattering and full of static. As if the sound waves were vibrating madly, flying apart. “I… my hands… they’re wrong… my thumbs are on the wrong side… I can’t see my feet… I don’t have any feet… my thumbs are coming out of my palms… where is my body… where.. “
“Pull him out,” Cushing said frantically. “Pull him the hell out of there!”
George and Menhaus yanked on the line, but it would not come. It felt like it was tied off to a slab of concrete. Saks took hold of it and so did Cushing, burned and bandaged hands or not. But the rope was stuck. They pulled and tugged until sweat ran down their faces.
“Fabrini!” Cushing cried out. “Fabrini? Can you hear me? Can you feel the rope in your hands? Follow the rope back through…”
“Rope… rope… rope… it’s stuck through me… I have too many legs, too many legs… what is that… that pale green face… no not a face… a cube… a living cube and a worm and a face of crystal… a million crawling bubbles… get me out of here! White faces without bodies… without eyes… don’t let them touch me… don’t let them touch me! GET ME OUT OF
HERE!”
Again, they yanked on the rope, everyone shouting and panicked and just utterly beside themselves. But the rope was not budging. It was hooked to something or around something and George doubted that even a bulldozer could have pulled it free.
“C’mon!” Menhaus shouted. “Pull! Pull! We gotta get him out of there!”
“It’s no good,” Saks said, panting.
George and Cushing gave the rope a final tug. It went limp in their hands, then taut, then limp again. It began to flop first this way, then that as if they had landed the mother of all trout. The field began to shimmer and then they could feel Fabrini’s weight on the other end again, he was screaming now, screaming something about “inside-out faces melting into hungry bubbles.” They gave the rope a good yank and Fabrini came through for just a moment, part of him did anyway.
But it wasn’t right, whatever was on the other side, whatever void or dimension or fractal between, had changed him, mixed-up his atoms maybe. They saw his back and his neck and the gold chain he always wore around his throat lit up like it was electrified. But there didn’t seem to be a head on top of his neck and his left arm was detached, floating above his head. His right arm was connected, but instead of the arm facing forward at the crook of his elbow, it was facing backward like it had been put back on wrong. And the rope…
The rope was not looped around him, it had passed right through his back and out the other side.
And he was screaming. God, yes, he was screaming with what sounded like a hundred spectral voices just out of sync with one another.
Elizabeth screamed and so did George.
Then Fabrini was pulled back into whereever he had been, but his left arm was still disembodied and it was alive, working, not bleeding or damaged in any way. Like when Menhaus had passed his hand into the mirror and his fingers came out of the other mirror. It was like that. Somehow, some way, through some obscene perversion of matter, that arm was still connected. Everyone watched it. It was gripping something and pulling itself along it.
“The rope,” George said. “The rope… it’s pulling itself along the rope…”
Then it, too, was gone.
Fabrini was just shrieking on the other side and there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it.
The rope came alive in their hands again. Something on the other side took it and with such force, it nearly pulled George and Menhaus right into the flow, too. The rope burned through their palms, whipping and snapping, jerking to the left, the right. Up, then down. Then it dropped slack in the flow, but did not fall, as if it was caught in some unbelievable stasis of antigravity. It just floated like a length of hose floating on the surface of a river.
George and the others just stood there.
Menhaus’ jaw was hanging open, his eyes wide and unblinking.
Saks just stepped back and away from the flow.
Then George found himself and reached in there, took hold of the rope and it was so very cold it burned his hands. He squealed like he had been scalded, but yanked the rope out. Cushing took hold of it where it wasn’t in the flow and Menhaus joined him. They pulled and the rope came out of the field easily.
And so did Fabrini.
He stumbled out of the flow… except he didn’t stumble, he drifted. Like a balloon he drifted out of the flow. He was seized up tight, arms at his sides, frozen stiff as meat in a freezer. His face was locked in some frightening, inanimate cataleptic sort of stupor like Bela Lugosi’s trademark catatonic stare.
That’s when George noticed – as they all did – that Fabrini was transparent. They could see right through him. It wasn’t Fabrini, not really, but more like a reflection of Fabrini. Like he had been replaced by this empyreal, extradimensional wraith.
Menhaus muttered something under his breath and reached out, touched Fabrini. He instantly cried out, his fingers frostbitten as if he’d touched dry ice. Where his fingertips had made contact, Fabrini’s image fluttered, trembled, then began to dissolve and was suddenly not there at all. The rope shuddered in midair, looped around nothing that anyone could see. Then it fell limply to the floor.
Menhaus made a choking, gagging sound, trying to catch his breath. “He was solid, but he was gas… he was solid… I could feel him… but cold, so very cold…”
And then, from the other side of the field, they could hear Fabrini crying out for help. No, he was not just crying, but screaming, begging, pleading to be pulled out of there. Just shrieking his mind away and it was almost too much for anyone standing there. Even Saks looked like he was about to faint.
Cushing, knowing full well the futility of it all, took up a gaff and waded right into the flow, Elizabeth shouting at him to get out of there. He reached through the buzzing blue field with it, reaching around in there for something, anything. But the gaff wasn’t long enough to grab anything if there was indeed anything to grab.
Menhaus took up the rope, cut the loop off it. Then he unscrewed the hook off the end of one of the gaffs and tied it firmly on there. He stepped into the flow with it and, whipping it around over his head like a cowboy about to rope a stray doggie, he tossed it through the field. Then pulled it back. Tossed it and pulled it back. Kept doing it.
“He’s gone,” Saks said.
And he was… yet he wasn’t. You could still hear him from time to time screaming out there for help. That voice would get so loud it would pull your guts out, then so quiet it was like a cry for help coming from a house several streets away in the dead of night.
And George thought: It’s like they’re dragging a river for a corpse.
And that’s exactly what they were doing.
Cushing stayed in the flow with Menhaus and they took turns. Kept at it for maybe ten minutes until they caught a hold of something. They looked at each other with jerky motions in the flow. Whatever they had, they were reeling it in. They stepped from the flow and George helped them land it.
“Maybe… maybe you guys better not do that,” Saks said.
And he was probably right.
But they kept pulling until they dragged something through the field and out of the flow, something like a pile of dusty, filthy rags.
“Jesus,” Menhaus said, turning away.
It was Fabrini.
Or what was left of Fabrini.
Something shriveled and desiccated, dusty and shrunken like a mummy pulled from an Egyptian tomb. That’s what they were seeing. It was a man, but petrified like prehistoric wood. His flesh had gone to a wrinkled, parched leather, seamed and fissured and ancient. Two spidery hands were held out before the face in brown skeletal claws as if to ward off a blow. And the face… distorted, grotesque, almost clownish in its gruesome exaggeration. It no longer had eyes, just blackened hollows that were wide and shocked. The mouth was open as if frozen in a contorted scream… the left side of it pulled up nearly to the corner of the left eye like maybe that cadaverous face had been soft putty that was molded into a fright mask to scare the kiddies with.
