Eyes that destroy, eyes that devour, eyes that violate and consume and burn, burn, burn, oh dear Christ the burning burning burning static breath…
Eyes that were black holes and quasars and the ravening charnel wastes of dead-end space. Depthless crystalline eyes that burned with a green smoke, chromatic graveyards and diseased moons that washed him down in cosmic rays and gamma rays and phosphorescent streams of cremating atoms that found his mind and gnawed the meat from it and sucked its blood and vacuumed-free its marrow and gnawed its charred bones.
Yes, it found Greenberg and Greenberg pleased it, filled it, satisfied its relentless and voracious appetite. He was burnt offerings beneath the fission of its nuclear winter breath.
Greenberg’s flesh became bubbling wax.
His bones liquified like melted candlesticks.
His skull became a boiling, steaming pot of cold, white radioactive jelly.
And even as his mind was stripped to bone and his muscles and nerve endings and anatomy became running tallow, he felt his hand jerk the cord.
Heard from some distant room, the noose drop over the Fog-Devil, that extradimen-sional abomination, that distortion out of space, out of time.
32
“Okay,” George was saying, “veer to the left, to the left…”
Menhaus jerked the wheel and they went too far, the needle of the compass swinging far to the right and almost stopping George’s heart with it. But without being told, he brought the boat back until the needle was pointing straight up, attracted by an unknown magnetic influence.
“Hold it there now,” George said. “We’re moving straight at whatever it is…”
Behind them, far, far behind them there was a rumbling sound like thunder. A deafening hollow boom. The fog behind them was lit with a flickering green light.
They knew what it was.
The anti-matter bomb. The collision of dimensions, the big bang.
Seconds now, mere seconds before that shockwave found them, atomized them into mist.
Oh, it was a breathless time. A frenzied time. An insane time. A time when all and everything were balanced on the head of some celestial pin and George could feel the world trembling, waiting to fall, readying itself for that great, godless fall to the pavement far below. He could almost feel that pavement rushing up at him, feel himself impacting with a splatter of blood and bones and memory.
The compass needle began to spin.
George’s heart leaped.
Menhaus muttered, “I think, I think…”
George held the teleporter in his hands. They were shaking badly and he almost dropped it. He held it steady, placed one hand on the scope and the boat began to vibrate, static electricity snapped and crackled all around him making his hair stand on end. The generator hummed, the scope shot out a blue pencil of light that was refracted, boosted, amplified, turned back upon itself and a stream of blue pulsing, ionzed particles shot out into the fog… made the fog glow and seem to momentarily freeze like frost on a window pane.
And then, then…
And then there it was, the fog within a fog, a breath of interdimensional lunacy surging out at them. A vortex, a hole, a tear
… and they were plowing right into it, Menhaus jerking the throttle down out of sheer exhileration. There was a blinding flash of light that knocked them right out of their seats and a sickening sense of falling, of drifting, of tumbling through white space and cosmic noise… and, yes, a sensation of speed and distance and time and particulated matter.
And then blackness.
It lasted for less than a minute, but when they opened their eyes and found their bodies, they were gasping for breath. Coughing, gagging, delirious and disoriented. George made it to his knees and crashed back down onto the deck of the cigarette boat.
Panic, just panic… that weird, inexplicable sense of pressure and lack of it, of fullness and emptiness and countless leagues of nothing. Then even that was gone and they were breathing air, good clean air that filled their lungs and revitalized them.
Panting, George sat up.
It was black, blacker than black.
The boat was rocking as small, choppy waves bumped it to and fro. And overhead, overhead George could see-
Stars.
EPILOGUE
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
1
In the end there was irony.
Irony in that after all those days or weeks spent in that other place, that bad place, they came out in what George figured was the Atlantic and they were just as lost as ever. When they got their bearings and decided they were actually home, really and honestly home, George turned on one of the cockpit lights and looked at the compass. It was pointing to what he figured was magnetic north. No deviation, no nothing.
And when that happened and the wonder of it all had faded, if only momentarily, George read the compass and pointed his finger. “That way’s east, Olly, that’s where land will be.”
So Menhaus fired up the cigarette boat and they headed east, the cigarette boat glad to be back in the sea, the real sea, back in water it understood. In reacted in kind, firing off into the night like a rocket, cutting through those black waters and kicking up a gout of spray in its wake.
George turned on the radio.
What he was hoping for was a station. Any station. News or music or anything that would tell them, yes, you’re back in the right century. But all they got was static. Maybe it was the radio and maybe atmospheric disturbance and maybe, just maybe, the worse sort of portent.
“We’re home,” Menhaus kept saying. “I know we’re home.”
George knew they were, too. The only question was, what year it might be.
But there would be time for that, wouldn’t there?
Because right then the air smelled salty and fresh and cool, no fog or stagnance or floating seaweed. No, nothing but the sea and the night and the boat beneath them taking them to a place either they would know or to one where they and their boat would be freaks, out of place and out of time. Regardless, breaking free of the Dead Sea, there was hope. It burned brightly and their souls burned with it. With the lifting of that perpetual fog, even in the darkness and starlight, they felt free, absolutely unbound. Around them they could feel the spaces and distance and it was good to be free of the fog and its claustrophobia.
But, there was irony.
The next day the sun burned hot and the sea became a mirror and the heat was almost unbearable. George had forgotten just how bright the sun was. By late afternoon, the cigarette boat had exhausted the last of the fuel and there was nothing to do but drift and hope.
When night came, George fell asleep.
Maybe for an hour, maybe less. But when he woke up, Menhaus was shaking him roughly.
