I should have known. Of course he told her about the danger. She was his daughter. And of course she did not believe him. If she had, she would not have been here in the first place.
The Coil got a little brighter. The ring of colors was now solid. The throbbing, thrumming rose a note in pitch.
“Miss Dreadful! It’s Muromets! We can talk about this when you are a hundred yards away from the building! Move it! Now!”
She did that thing girls with escaping hair sometimes do to blow a strand away from their eyes. It involves pursing your lips as if whistling while pouting and turning your eyes up and tossing your head back slightly. It looks adorable on any sufficiently pretty girl.
“Don’t call me Dreadful. It sounds ridiculous. I understand the phenomena I am dealing with, and I am safe from any danger. The seaward of the in carnie ’twould baas the danger of ass troll gee from the Direct Hour.”
I thought for a moment that my ears were dyslexic. I tried to sort out the sounds of her lilting accent in my head the way you do when you are not sure if Jimi Hendrix just sang Excuse me while I kiss the sky or Accuse me while I kiss this guy.
The crazy words finally clicked into place, but they did not make any more sense to me. The seaward of the Incarnate World bars the danger of astrology from the Dark Tower. Or maybe the first word was Sea Ward.
“Are you out there? Please come in. You can assist me in drawing down the twilight … If my father told you his plan, he doubtless failed to mention mine is the safer and wiser…”
And she started to move away from the fuse box. She took a step toward the narrow passage running past the empty wine shelves from the generator area to the basement room.
Closer to the death ray.
I was expecting her to melt into a skeleton before my eyes any second. I realized I had wasted half a minute. I could have sprinted to the back of the building, pounded down the stairs, grabbed her, thrown her over my shoulder Tarzan-style, and sprinted the hundred yards to safety (if that was far enough—what kind of radiation were we talking about?) in the same amount of time it had taken me to exchange one hundred words with her. Even now, I might be quick enough to circle to the basement door, leap down, Tarzan her over my shoulder, and hightail it out of the blast radius.
Or it might be even quicker to take my squirrel gun and shoot.
2. Battle in the Basement
With an instinct more powerful than instinct, I knew I could not shoot at the Moebius coil itself. It was a gorgeous machine. Gorgeous as the patterns on a rattlesnake, gorgeous as a forest fire leaping with wild red and billowing black. It was my ticket out of here. It was not only the gateway into other worlds; it was the escape hatch out of this one. It was the escape meant for me leading to the life meant for me.
Therefore I had to protect it as dearly as my own life.
But I noticed something. If I shot the cable leading to the table, this would simply cut the power. I had the key to the closet where the spare cables were kept. After the emergency, I could plug back the unharmed equipment and warm it back up.
At the opposite wall, less than eighteen feet away, therefore about ten times closer than I needed, point-blank, was the plug box, and it was set against a concrete wall with nothing nearby, and nothing beyond it. This was not the wall facing the generator room; it was the wall beyond which was packed dirt. It was like it was designed to be shot at. Safe as a target range.
And, heck, I really was in the mood to shoot something, and there were no science fiction fans around at the moment. And even if there had been, I could not shoot them anyway. Had to hack them to death with the antique sword. Father’s orders. So I put the rifle to my shoulder, let out my breath, held it, and…
And just then the machine started to whistle, then to shriek.
It sounded just like a teakettle.
Looked like one, too. I could see the condensation of vapor already starting to form in the room around the table, and so I could tell that the air was rushing out of the room. There was a thin little point, no bigger than a pinprick in the center of the rainbow circle, and a tiny tornado cone of vapor was beginning to form, with a needle-thin tail rushing into that spot.
Into, but not out of.
I’ve seen science fiction movies. I knew what I was looking at. It was like getting a pinhole puncture in the hull of your spaceship. All the air at fifteen pounds per square inch tries to rush out the tiny hole. The sudden expansion of the air causes a temperature change, and that makes the water vapor condense.
But this was not a pinhole in the hull of a spaceship. It was a pinhole in the walls of the universe. On the other side was not outer space. On the other side was — what had the Professor called it? — on the other side was the Deep of Uncreation.
The pinhole at the dead center flared and roared and opened. Maybe I should not have, but I looked straight at it.
Call it an orb of darkness smaller than a golf ball, an open mouth, a well, a pit, a black hole, a portal. But it was not a sphere; light and air entering any point on the circumference did not reach the far side. There was no far side. Inside, where my eyes could not focus, something was rippling like water in turmoil. Like a sailor looking out a knothole in a plank in the hull of a sinking ship, I saw the ocean of nonbeing, a vast deep, a sea of darkling chaos with no shore and no bottom.
This weird sensation was in my eyes, it reached into my brain, and something about it made me sure I was looking at the golfball-sized knothole wrong, as if my sense perceptions were inside out. This tiny dot of nothingness was somehow bigger than the basement room it was in, bigger than the Museum, maybe bigger than the continuum.
The edges of this tiny golfball (yet it was vast, so very vast) were frayed and flickering, and the Moebius coil groaned and sputtered, spitting sparks. It strained just like a primitive piece of machinery would do if someone or something, who knew such machines inside and out, had latched onto the energy field it was creating from the other side, and was forcing it open. Think of it as cracking a bottle of nitrous oxide into the professor’s Model-T.
Fog formed as quickly as when you breathe on a window on a hot day. The fog was only touching the upright coil itself, and the table, like a smoke ring. It was the same hue you sometimes see right after a cloudy sunset, when the light rays are bent by the Earth’s atmosphere into such a dark red that it mingles with purple.
I thought my eyes had been damaged by radiation, because the table and the things on it blurred and darkened so much. Then I thought instead that maybe the photons had been damaged, or maybe the fundamental structure of spacetime. This was the twilight my father had mentioned, the cloak hem of Uncreation.
It takes me a long while to describe this, but trust me; it took a short glance for me to see it. Penny had not yet taken a second step, and meanwhile this whole time I was still shouting.
“Penny! My father says your father is telling the truth! He is not crazy! He did contact an extradimensional intelligence! But the intelligence he contacted is hostile! The machine they tricked your father into constructing is a trap, a weapon, a snare! Please run!”
But she did not run. Instead she said something softly, turned, reached back with her hand, and pulled the main switch on the fuse box. I did not hear her words, but I heard the tone of voice. It was what you might call a — well then, why not just …? — tone of voice.
Click. Lights out.
Pretty smart. No need to run from the dangerous machine. Safer to turn it off.
For a second, I was giddy with relief.
But it was not dark. Only the lights in the generator room were out.
The utility room was lit up like a Christmas tree, because a rainbow the size of a bicycle wheel was still flaming and blazing on the workbench. It was fading, getting dimmer, but still there.
Some old radios take a moment to fade out of hearing even after you flip the switch, or old vacuum cleaners hum. Maybe the Moebius coil was like that. Or maybe was there power from som
e source not in this room, not in this universe, trying to keep the doorway open. I don’t know which, but I know which way I’d bet.
It did not get dimmer fast enough. The orb was shrinking, but…
With a crack of noise like a pistol shot, something came through.
Bang!
In the other room, by the dim light of her candle, I saw Penny’s body jerk as if struck.
Two more cracks rang out as one. Ba-Bang!
My heart stopped, or my brain. But no: she had been startled at the noise. It was a flinch, not a bullet impact. “Hit the dirt!” I shouted. “Get down!”
It was three somethings. Not pistol fire. They were long and thin and golden-red, like spears from a speargun, and they shot from the dark orb at the eye of the rainbow ring, one after another and another. The barrel velocity was respectable: that crack was a miniature sonic boom, like the snap a whip makes when the tip passes the speed of sound.
But the spears were also like snakes, because when two of them struck the far wall (leaving white cavities in the old brick) and fell to the ground, they clattered and began writhing and twisting. I smelled ozone through the open window, that storm smell you sometimes get after lightning strikes. The spears were machines, dynamos wielding immense power.
I now saw that they were chains made of scores of little triangular prisms, arranged like sausage links, so that when the metal snakes writhed and started to plug their tail-jacks into their mouth-sockets, they would have formed a twisted single-surface loop like the crude one sitting on the breadboard table. They were Moebius coils; doorway engines.
But these metal snake-chains were easily six yards long, and the hoops they were trying to form were two yards across: big enough to let something from Uncreation come into our universe, something wider in diameter than the golfball-hole the slender chains had been designed to spear through.
Through the right basement window, I could see that Penny had not hit the dirt as I had so loudly requested. Instead, she had picked up a broom from the corner where it was kept with some other cleaning equipment, and after adjusting her eyeglasses on her nose she was striding purposefully toward the door, as if meaning to fling it open and go through it. Maybe she was going to give everything a very thorough sweeping. Or maybe she thought the noise of the death-ray was being caused by a squirrel, or some other small yet furry menace that could be defeated with a broomstick. Maybe she was out of her mind. But she looked entirely calm.
The first of the metal snake-coils was settling right before the door, a closing circle of metal like the snare for a rabbit, and Penelope Dreadful, the most perfectly formed girl ever designed, was about to step through the door and put her foot right in the middle of it. Even before the C-shape of the links had closed to an O-shape, the snake-coils were whining, internal dynamos powering up, and the rainbow light of unreality was beginning to flicker up and down the metal prisms. The eerie shine seemed very bright in the multicolored gloom.
I remembered something. I was holding a rifle. Heck, I already had it at my shoulder, cheek against the stock, sights lined up and everything.
The fog effect of the twilight was not near me. Gunpowder might not ignite in the twilight, but bullets maybe could fly into it.
So I fired twice. Bang! Bang! I am still proud of those shots, and I really doubt I could shoot that well again.
Must have been the adrenaline. Or the girl.
Because I hit the glowing snake coil right in front of the door in its metal head-socket before it could form a circle and close the connection with itself, and I hit the other snake in the tail-socket, so that when it put its nose to its tail to plug in, it couldn’t.
Both the snakes made sad little electronic noises and flopped over dead. (When I am saying head and tail, I just mean the front and back ends of the chain-shaped Moebius coil machines. They did not really have heads. They had sockets. But, darn, they sure moved like snakes, and I was as afraid of them as I would have been of rattlers.) They went dark, and gloom flooded back into the utility room.
Too much gloom. The homemade Moebius coil on the desk, black with teardrops where the uninsulated copper wire was melting, chose that moment to give off a cough of smoke, and the rainbow effect snapped out of existence in a vibrating whirl of sparks.
Part of the equipment was smoking, and I heard, rather than saw, the big golden ring itself, looking now like the bowlegged child of the cowboy was fainting, toppled over with a crash.
Twilight Door closed. Ostiary mission successful.
And the gateway into the other world, something I would have gnawed off my leg to keep intact, was dark, and harmless. It was dead. Like my hopes.
My stomach was flip-flopping with acrid anguish. The door was not only closed, I had shot the other two…
Two? Where was the third one? I had counted three bangs.
The utility room was now entirely dark, or should have been: but the basement window in the corner was now lit up with the electro-rainbow glow and fog of the other-dimensional energies. It was coming from outside, from beyond the building.
3. The Third Coil
That light, dim as it was, shone colored beams enough into the dark room to reveal the dent in the waterpipe near the ceiling, and the spiderweb-shaped hole burned into the same basement window so brightly lit up. The edges of the hole were blackened where the glass had fused.
The third spear had come through at a different angle, flown wide, and ricocheted off the metal pipe and out through the glass. It must have happened right before my eyes, and made a noise like a sledgehammer, but I just did not notice it — maybe that particular split-second I had been preoccupied thinking Penny had been gun-shot.
I was off like a jackrabbit, somehow running before I had even gotten my feet under me, sprinting around the corner of the Museum, jumping with a thump over the ramp-shaped cellar doors, too much in a hurry to take the extra step it would have taken to go around, and grabbing the rain-pipe in one hand to help me swing around the corner without having to lean into the turn. The antique sword hanging from my baldric was clumsy enough to give me a sharp slap on my hip as I tore around that corner.
I saw it. It was resting on the grass. The snake had swallowed its tail, forming its Moebius coil. The circle of prism-shaped links had already powered up. The metal prisms were blurred and darkened like that heat-shimmer, and in their place was a rainbow, blue on the outside and red on the inside.
The homemade Moebius coil on the workbench in the utility room had taken several long moments for the rainbow bridge to form, and get coherent, and grow bright. Not this one. A circle of light big as a fireman’s net blazed in the grass, as quickly as a flamethrower vomiting fire, and the Haunted Museum threw a multicolored shadow directly away from it.
A black ball of mist was forming on the ground right in the center of the rainbow ring, about the size of a pea, but, with a scream and a roar, it was the size of a baseball, a basketball, a wrecking ball. The funnel of a tornado had already formed reaching upward from the rainbow flame-ring prone on the grass.
I brought my squirrel gun up to my shoulder, aimed, squeezed off a shot, missed.
The mouth of Uncreation opened wide and breathed in. The roar of a hurricane picked me off my feet before I knew it.
If you remember as a child picking up a fold of the white tablecloth that hung down into the reach of your chubby fingers, and pulling it just to see what would happen if all the china plates and fluted wineglasses and sparkling silverware, steaming pot of mashed potatoes, or pitcher of iced tea or decanter of port, Mom’s green glass vase spilling roses and water, the tall candlesticks with flame like comets’ tails, shedding hot wax, and all were to come crashing down on top of your curious little head—if you remember ever doing that, you know what this was like.
So much air at such a high velocity was being sucked into the black orb, it was like the sky was folded together pulled off the edge, everything sucked toward one point.
Me in
cluded.
The squirrel gun was yanked from my hands and went flying. There was nothing to grab on to. It was a wind tunnel, and I was a scrap of leaf. I was pulled into the black orb head-first.
I was curled in a ball, with my elbows up to shield my face from an impact that never came; but I did not hit the surface of the black orb. There was no surface. There was nothing.
And then there was more nothing.
4. Oops
So one second, I was feeling so sorry for myself that my gorgeous gateway out of the universe had burnt up and fallen over. The next second, a second gateway opens up and swallows me. Call me crazy, but at first I was elated and awed. I had fallen out of my home dimension. Even if I died in the next moment, I would die in a place beyond the beyond: a voyage greater than any man ever achieved. I had gone farther than Magellan, found a world newer than Columbus, stranger than the world on which Armstrong left his footprint.
Then I saw that was nowhere. Elation feels a lot like fear, and awe turns quickly to panic.
The deep called Uncreation was nothing. Nothing had been created there. Not even air.
It was dark and there was nothing to breathe. Let it never be said that reading science fiction books was a waste of time, because it might have saved my life just then. I had read what you are supposed to do if you suffer explosive decompression. You open your mouth and shout. This expels the air which otherwise would rupture your lungs. You have about ten seconds before you faint, ninety seconds before you die.
Chapter Four: The Nothing Between Something
1. The Deep
This vacuum felt oddly warm. I was in free fall, except unlike the time my dad made me go parachuting, during that one really long second before the ripcord opened my chute, there was no air resistance. Even so, it felt like falling.
But I was not falling. The rainbow ring through which I had toppled was hanging above me like the mouth of a well, but I was not falling down the well. It was zero gravity, and I was not moving. Maybe.