'There's nothing supernatural about this,' Carl said, affecting an amused smile. 'What's happened to me is mysterious but not occult. It'll all make sense someday when I can talk about it. But now, I want to know about Zeke. How is he?'
Caitlin's response was sharp as a whip: 'He went mad.'
Carl shifted in his seat, alarmed by the old woman's antagonism: The eld skyle had known Zeke had suffered. The confirmation of it burned. 'Where is he?'
'At the Cornelius Psychiatric Hostel. It's an asylum on Long Island,' Sheelagh told him. She reached over and put a hand on his arm. The solid muscle banding his wrist amazed her. 'He's pretty bad now. But for a while, just before his breakdown, he went through a brief creative spell. Painting, plasticine models. He even wrote a novel.'
'You have a copy?' he asked.
'Somewhere. It'd be easier to get one at a book-store. I see it around. It's called Shards of Time. It's science fiction.'
Carl uncoiled from his seat. 'Want to come with me?' he asked.
'It's eleven oclock, ' Sheelagh answered, getting up anyway. 'All the stores are closed.'
'We'll break in. Come on.' He motioned for Caitlin to join them, but she just stared at him across her drink, cold with suspicion.
Carl got a copy that night by paying a ludicrous sum to a night watchman at Brentano's. He and Sheelagh went back to the Sutton Place suite. Caitlin was asleep where they had left her. Sheelagh put her to bed, and when she came back, Carl was immersed in the book, his face stony and pale. She waited around to see if he might show some interest in her, and when he didn't, she went to bed.
A rage of disbelief mounted in him the more he read. The monotonous fear that had inhabited him since Evoe had been taken away blew off in a cold blast of horror. The book he was reading was an account of his life in the Werld!
The names were different: The eld skyle was called an urg, skyles were skylands, the Foke were the People, zotl were spider people, and the Werld was Timesend. It was a story in the bold, often bloated style of science fiction:
The flyer landed on a skyland cliff among spires of fir. The,pod went black.
'We'll send the flyer back,' Eve's alto voice said in the darkness. '`They'll only be able to trace us to here-and by the time they do we'll be long gone.'
The canopy bolts hissed open, and sharp alpine air flushed in. I rolled out of the flyer, and stood up among bleached grass drooping over a whispering plunge. My eyes must have looked like raisins, for Eve sang with laughter.
At dawn, he was reading the book through for the second time, terrified by the parallel reality of its words. Only the ending was different, for it depicted Eve and Ken, the narrator, going off together blissfully into Timesend.
His eyes were red, tear-torn, and his whole body hollowed, a bubble of silence. He dropped the book and shuffled out of the apartment, needing air. He walked down Fifty-seventh Street to Central Park.
Madness is lonely, he thought at the edge of the pond, dawn spreading on the water like a tree of light.
The city of his mind was frenzied with the commerce of implications and ideas. 'How could Zeke have known?'
was the question that enjambed 'What is .real, anyway?' This was earthtwo. This was a place as alien as the Werld. Nothing was real. Everything was possible.
Not even Evoe's song was his in this place.
Madnesses mingled in him, and he may very well have lost all perspective then and there, but the wild shout that was gathering sound in him was interrupted by the slice of a sharply pitched whistle. It was the furious sound of his mind cracking. Until he recognized whaf it must be: The whistle was coiling from his left breast pocket.
He reached into his chamois jacket and withdrew the imp card in a hand that went cold with realization.
The sound was the warning tone, announcing that something sizable had come through his lynk to the Werld. He looked about him-but, of course, there was nothing Werldlike here: In his amazed stupor he had left his lance back at the apartment!
He sprinted across Fifty-ninth, caroming off brak-ing cars and bounding around pedestrians. Whatever it VMS, it was back at the suite.
Sheelagh was asleep, but the sound from where Carl had dropped his gear woke her. It was not a recognizable noise. It sounded like oil sizzling in a pan, only louder and with a crackle that was almost electrical.
Sheelagh had left her door open in case Carl wanted to be with her, and she could see Caitlin asleep in her open room. She got out of bed, and the noise crisped sharper. She didn't bother putting a robe over her negligee but went directly to Carl's room.
The hot noise was definitely fuming from there. She knocked, and the weird sound went on heedlessly.
'Carl?' The door was unlocked. She nudged it open and saw nothing through the crack. She opened the door wide and only then saw what was making the racket.
The wall above Carl's empty bed was brown with the thick shape of a giant bug. The huge trilobite shimmered with the vibrations of its complex mouthparts and antennae.
Sheelagh screamed, and the thing scuttled off thewall and onto the bed. Its broad, flat body covered the whole quilt, its many thorn-spurred legs quivering with the insanity of its gnarled perceptions.
Sheelagh's scream woke Caitlin, and she popped out of her room in time to see the insectile head emerge from Carl's room.
