And as Rick gazed down at the picture, the witch in the drawing looked up at him!
He gasped aloud. The drawing had come to life! The picture of Baba Yaga grinned at him, toothless. She laughed that high, cackling laugh again.
“Don’t forget, Rick,” she said, cackling. “You hold the truth inside you. The truth is your greatest weapon.”
The wind rose even higher, and the book came free of its place against the stone and tumbled away into the mist, gone.
Rick shook his head to clear away the image of the talking picture. Had it been real? Who could say? Was anything real in this place?
He started moving again, through the mist, among the graves.
He came nearer to the wall of cloud. It loomed above him, more fearsome with every step he took. Now Rick had to crane his neck to look up to the top of it. But there was no top. The cloud wall blotted out everything above him, as high as the sky and higher. It stood as far to the left and right as Rick could see. The cloud was dark and full and ominous like storm clouds just before they break. It was moving with a thick, bubbling motion like boiling tar, and the sound of it was a steady, hoarse roar. Now and then, the lightning flashed inside it. It seemed to turn the cloud translucent so that Rick caught glimpses of the thing on the other side: a silhouette of a hulking creature the size of a building. In the split second it was visible, the dark shadow moved behind the cloud, and its footsteps shook the earth. Boom. Boom. Boom. Then the lightning faded and the steps were drowned out by rolling thunder.
Rick reached the cloud. He stopped. He stood before the boiling wall, staring into the darkness of it. Without the lightning, that darkness was impenetrable. He breathed in deeply, trying to work up the courage to step into the storm, but for another long moment he hesitated. He could feel the miasmic dampness of the cloud on his skin. He could feel it right through his armor, a damp that was clammy and slick with filth. He hated the thought of entering.
His silver armor rippled on his skin.
As long as your faith stays strong, it will give you more power than you ever knew you had.
Rick prayed for courage. On the instant—almost as he thought the words—the prayer was answered, and more. Courage was all he asked for, and it would have been enough, but not only did the courage come to him but also some living sense of love that he knew would sustain him even if things came to the worst. His father was in that love, his mother, his goofy brother, Raider, Molly too; the love contained them all and they were all with him and the love was with him and he was no longer afraid.
Rick stepped into the storm cloud.
“The code in the black box is the code we got from your mind,” the Traveler told Molly. “In theory, you should be able to join your thoughts to that code seamlessly.”
The techs had brought in another cot for her. She was lying down on it now, right beside Rick. Dial had put a headband on her with wires that would plug into the black box. She could feel her heart fluttering with fear, but she didn’t care. Fear was only fear. It would not stop her.
“What that connection will be like or whether it will give you any power over Mariel, I don’t know. But you might be able to give her some of your strength.”
Standing right behind him, and towering over him, Professor Jameson licked his lips with anxiety. “What if Mariel gives her some of her weakness?”
Molly tried to smile at him. “Don’t worry, Daddy,” she said.
He smiled back. “Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t help.”
The Traveler glanced over his shoulder at Chuck.
“We lost him,” said Chuck. “He’s in that fogbank. I can’t track him anymore.”
The Traveler looked down at Molly again. “If we’re going to do this . . .”
Molly nodded. “Do it,” she said.
Lawrence Dial took a deep breath and plugged Molly into the black box.
Molly never lost her RL consciousness. She never fully entered the Realm. Instead, she went into a kind of fugue state where it seemed her dreams and the world blended together. On the one hand, she was aware of the makeshift portal room around her: the techs, the monitors, the glass coffins, Rick on his cot, her father and Professor Dial gazing down at her with a mixture of worry and scientific curiosity. On the other hand, an image had formed in her mind. Like a daydream, only much, much clearer. It was an image of a city in mist. A field in the distance . . . a field of stones . . . a graveyard, that’s what it was! And there was a man there. Or not a man, but a fairy or sprite, made of blue light. Favian, yes. And as she looked out at those images, she had a sense of herself, her own body, changing form, becoming less solid, more liquid, a flow of energy with fluid, changing outlines. More than that, there were new thoughts coming to her. There was new knowledge. They were not her thoughts. It was not her knowledge. But somehow she knew what she hadn’t known before.
She focused her mind as hard as she could. She tried to think into the things she saw, the things she felt, the things she knew.
She thought, We have to go with Rick. We have to help Rick. We have to.
“We have to go with Rick,” said Mariel.
Favian looked up, startled by the sound of her voice. Suddenly she sounded stronger, surer. Suddenly her figure had become younger, more powerful. Her voice filled the mist around him.
“We have to help him,” she said.
“Why should we?” Favian spat out bitterly. “He doesn’t care about us. He was going to leave you here—leave you to die . . .” His voice trailed off. He was still angry at what Rick had said, but already the anger was beginning to curdle in him and turn to guilt. He had lost his temper, and in his rage, he had let his friend walk into danger alone. He knew it was wrong. Even as he was doing it, he knew. But the anger was like another person inside him, a person telling him to do what he knew he shouldn’t. He’d obeyed the anger and now he wished he hadn’t.
“Favian,” said Mariel. “Listen to me. I can’t explain it all to you now. But Rick will not leave me. Rick loves me and I love him, and we are going to be together.”
“But he just said—” Favian began.
Mariel cut him off. “It doesn’t matter what he said. He doesn’t know what I know. Trust me, Favian. It’s going to be all right. But we have to go to him. We have to help him. He’ll die alone if we don’t.”
Favian didn’t need that much encouragement. He was sorry for what he’d done. He nodded.
“All right.”
Mariel turned and gazed off into the distance as if she were thinking. “There is . . . there is a stream . . . that goes around the graveyard . . .,” she said haltingly.
“Yes, you said,” said Favian. “But you said you were too weak . . .”
“I’m not too weak. Not anymore. You hurry after Rick through the graveyard. I will meet you on the other side if I can.”
Favian hesitated only one more second. “And he won’t leave you here. You’ll come out with us.”
“I promise Rick and I will be together,” she told him. “If we live through this.”
Rick stepped into the cloud and his first thought was Yuh-uck!
It was disgusting here. It was beyond disgusting. It was hyperdisgusting. It was, like, electric disgusting amped to blast the back of your head off with disgust. That’s how disgusting it was.
The inside of the cloud seemed to be made of some sort of sewage soup: a thick, greasy goulash with chunks of pure nasty floating past. The stench was indescribable—and if you could have described it, it would have been unbelievable. It curled up Rick’s nose and down to the back of his throat and made him gag.
He forced his way through the roiling, boiling stew, his face screwed up like a baby’s face just before it cries. Whatever monster was waiting for him on the other side of this, he thought, it couldn’t be much worse than this.
And this just kept getting worse a
nd worse.
As he walked through the mess, the lightning flashed again. Rick let out a strangled moan of pure, wretched nausea. In the momentary light of the flash, he could see the substance through which he was moving. It was horrible . . . horrible. Those chunks of filth that kept swimming over him—they were alive! Bug-eyed little lobstery monsters with chattering fangs and claws, they bit and snapped at him as they went past, and when his armor repulsed them, the beasts let off an angry little puff of stink and slithered away.
When the lightning flashed out, the creatures became invisible again in the darkness. Which was equally horrific! Knowing they were there, feeling them take their little nips at him, smelling their awfulness. And just as Rick was praying to get to the other side of this thing . . .
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Even in the darkness, he began to make out the even darker darkness beyond the soupy wall: the hulking shape of the giant that was waiting for him, guarding the interface.
And now, the cloud began to thin. The soupy substance was becoming mist again. Rick could feel the walk grow easier. Fewer chunks and creatures touched him. The smell began to abate. His nausea receded. He started taking full breaths again. He was almost relieved.
Then the lightning struck and the thunder rolled at once, and in a single instant, the mist was gone and he got his first clear look at the King of the Dead.
Favian flashed through the graveyard mist. Even he was surprised he had the nerve to do it. Graveyards spooked him out. Mist spooked him out. Darkness spooked him out. Just about everything spooked him out if he had to do it alone.
But he had to do it, so he did. He flashed through the misty cemetery, simply ignoring whatever ghouls and zombies were probably right that minute circling him and moving in for the kill. Even the sight of the cloud wall in front of him didn’t make him hesitate. It didn’t make him happy, mind you. But though he swallowed a little harder as the flashing miasma loomed above him, he didn’t stop flashing past the graves to get to it. In fact, he didn’t even stop when he reached it. He figured if he let himself think about it, he’d never go through. Instead, Favian held his breath and flashed right into the cloud . . .
Or, that is, he would have. Except when he hit the wall of cloud, it was like hitting a brick wall, and he was flung backward and fell on his backside with an impact that jarred even a light-made creature like himself.
Favian got up. He floated in front of the boiling wall. He tried again to get through it—and again, it was like hitting brick.
At that moment, finally, all his anger against Rick dissipated. He realized the truth: Now that he wanted to help his friend, he couldn’t. As the cloud wall kept out the water that carried Mariel, so it also kept out light like the light he was made of. Only the more solid Rick could pass through the barrier.
Whatever happened in there, it was going to happen to Rick alone.
Mariel had never felt anything like what she was feeling now. As she flowed through the stream around the graveyard, fresh energy and fresh strength seemed to pour into her. But it wasn’t just that. Suddenly, she knew things, remembered things she had never known or remembered before. Rick loved her. And she loved Rick. And they were going to be together. The idea made her feel a kind of happiness she had never in her life felt before.
And yet how could it be true? When Rick said she was not even a human being. She was just a code coming out of a black box. How was it possible . . .?
An idea came to her . . . She slowed in her passage.
Hurry, a voice said inside her. Rick . . .
That voice . . . Mariel realized it was her voice, her thoughts, and yet . . . yet it also wasn’t.
Who are you? she thought.
The voice spoke back to her: I am Mariel.
And with a hundred images and sensations and memories crashing in on her all at once, Mariel thought, I am Molly.
Mariel did not understand completely, but she understood enough: She would not die in this place; she would not die alone; she would not lose the hero who had come to help her, the man she had come to love. She didn’t know how—not really—but it was going to be all right.
If only she could reach Rick in time.
With renewed energy she flowed on in the little stream . . .
. . . until she, too, reached the wall of fog and was blocked by it and could go no farther.
As he stepped out of the fog cloud, Rick found himself in a nowhere netherworld. He was standing on a floating circular platform of rock with nothing around it but starry darkness. It was a kind of arena, he thought, maybe as big as three or four football fields, but not much bigger. There’d be nowhere to run here, not for long. It was not a place made for escape. It was a place made for battle.
The only features of the floating rock were occasional jutting crags and boulders, rough stalagmites that stuck up out of the stony earth. And at the far edge, looming up high about a hundred yards, mingling with the blackness beyond the rocky arena, there was a transparent ghostly image of a face, an ugly face that looked like a cross between a toad and a skull.
Kurodar.
That was the interface: the place where Kurodar’s mind connected to the Realm, the source of the Realm, and the imagination that created it.
And the King of the Dead prowled back and forth before it, ready to slaughter anyone who tried to do it harm.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The King of the Dead was a monster. But more than that, it seemed an assembly of monsters, half a dozen monsters, their parts cut up and rearranged into something new. Its body was immense and scaly as a dragon’s. It had a dinosaur tail that writhed behind it like a snake. It had slithery, squirming arms like the tentacles of an octopus. Several of its arms were holding weapons: a gigantic sword, a huge ax, a spear the size of a tree. Rising up behind its back were two enormous purple wings, bony and webbed like the wings of a demon.
But its face—that was the most horrific thing about it.
It was a human face. A man’s face. There was something particularly horrible about that, about a human face crowning that monstrosity. Cruelty and viciousness were etched deeply into every feature of it: in the narrow planes and angles of its brow and cheeks, in the bright, furious gleam of its eyes, and in the thin lips pressed together in a tight smile of sadistic pleasure. The tortured intelligence in the man’s expression made it even uglier, even worse. It knew what it was, what a beast it was, and its only possible joy could be destruction.
It spotted Rick the moment he stepped out of the cloud wall. Its tight smile widened. Its bright eyes grew brighter still.
“You!” he said—and his deep voice rolled like the thunder inside the cloud. And then he laughed, and the air shook all around him.
In that first moment Rick confronted the great creature, he was so struck with shock and terror, he could barely think at all. Still, though, an idea began to form in the back of his mind. It wasn’t quite conscious. He wasn’t completely aware of what he was thinking and he couldn’t have put it into words. But even in that frightened moment, it flashed dimly through his brain that just as the Golden City was made of images from Kurodar’s imagination, so, too, was this beast, this guardian of the interface, this final boss in the great deadly video game that was MindWar. The monster was a combination of every monster Rick had met and battled in this cursed Realm. Its wings were the wings that Reza had had in the fortress; its snake-like tail belonged to the Spider-Snake; its octopus arms were the arms of the Octo-Guardian Rick had battled in the Realm’s black outer space . . .
. . . and so the face . . . the face, too, must belong to someone . . .
But before the thought could fully form, the King of the Dead attacked him. One of its slithery arms whipped back and forward and hurled the tree-sized spear right at him.
It happened so quickly, Rick barely had time even to think of getting out of the way. Then he did think it—and the
moment the thought crossed his mind, he found himself moving suddenly in a Favian-like flash.
Whoa!
It was the power of Mariel’s armor, he realized, magnifying his spirit and turning his thoughts to instantaneous action.
He flashed to the side in a silver streak and the spear fell where he had just been standing, its point smashing through the rock so that it stuck in the arena floor, its shaft shivering. Rick stared at the weapon that now pierced the ground where, a second ago, he had been standing. But before he could fully register the nearness of his escape, the King of the Dead flew at him.
One flap of its giant wings that stirred the mist to swirling and it was in the air, its great bulk lifting off the floor of the rock arena with preternatural grace. It let out a roar and . . .
Oh no! Rick thought.
. . . breathed out a gout of fire. The claws of its dragon feet extended like daggers as it plummeted down toward him, and another of its octopus arms snapped the edge of a gigantic ax at Rick’s head.
There was nowhere for Rick to go. If he dashed to the right, the ax would cut him down; to the left, the claws would impale him. Run away and the beast’s breath of flame would scorch him to cinders.
There was nothing else for him to do: he charged straight at the thing.
Again, his armor turned his very thought to action. Even as the King of Death flew at him through the air, he was flashing forward like a silver beam of light. He passed underneath the monster just before it landed. And when it did land, the thunderous tremor that shook the arena sent Rick spilling face-forward onto the rock.
The rough surface of the arena floor would have scraped his flesh off, but the armor protected him. Good thing, too, because he was able to leap up just in time to dodge the King of the Dead’s lashing tail. He leapt to his feet—and then leapt into the air as the spiny tail swept under him. By the time Rick dropped to the surface again, the King of the Dead had spun round to face him.