“Julien Advent and John Taylor,” said Benway.
“I think I felt safer before they got here,” said Rabette in a high, shaky voice. He smiled quickly, to show it was meant to be a joke. “We’ll take all the help we can get, but I don’t know what you can do. I don’t know there’s anything anyone can do. All hell’s breaking loose in there.”
“We should get the hell out of here!” said Burke, actually wringing his hands together.
“Shut up, both of you!” snarled Benway. “Call yourselves doctors . . .” She turned her back on them and marched over to stand before the barricaded door. She started to push the drinks machine out of the way, then found she couldn’t. Julien and I had to help her. Burke and Rabette reluctantly shifted everything else they’d piled up against the door, revealing a portholelike window in the top third of the steel door. Benway walked right up to it, listened carefully for a moment, then peered cautiously through the porthole. I looked at Julien and gave him my best hard stare.
“I think this would be a really good time for you to fill me in on what’s so important about Ward 12A, don’t you? What do they do in there; what kind of patients do they treat?”
“Ward 12A is reserved exclusively for those unfortunate enough to have been damaged by coming in contact with forces or beings from Outside the realms we know,” Julien said quietly. “Remind you of anything?”
“The Entities from Beyond,” I said.
“Exactly,” said Julien.
I looked at the very solid steel door and hoped it was as locked and sealed as the young doctors had said. “You think . . . maybe the Sun King is in there? Could he really have got here ahead of us, that fast?”
“Who knows what he’s capable of, now?” said Julien. “But let’s not add to our problems until we have to.”
“If you two have finished muttering secrets to each other, perhaps you’d like to take a look,” Benway said acidly.
Julien and I moved forward to join her. Burke and Rabette seized the opportunity to back away. Benway had her face pressed up close against the porthole, so Julien and I moved in on either side of her, our heads pressed close together. All I could see were flaring bright lights, sharp and intense, so bright I couldn’t even be sure what colours they were. The glare didn’t simply blaze through the porthole; it outlined the steel door itself. Great, angry, roaring sounds rose and fell on the other side of the door, none of them in any way human. I glanced at Benway.
“What exactly have you got in there? What’s wrong with these patients?”
“In Ward 12A, we deal mainly with possessions and abductions. Men and women, and sometimes children, unfortunate enough to have attracted the attention of forces from Outside. We try to treat people who have been taken and changed, physically and mentally, to adapt them to live on other worlds, or in other realities. Places where merely human forms couldn’t hope to survive. Of course, after these beings have finished with their experiments, they abandon their victims and dump them back where they found them. They never bother to undo the changes they’ve made, don’t care that the poor bastards have been altered so much they can’t cope with Earth conditions any more. Some of them end up at the Fortress, but the most damaged, or dangerous, are brought here. We do what we can for them, but mostly they’re contained here, in a secure facility. Ward 12A.”
“And the others?” said Julien.
She looked at him, then looked away. “Some things you don’t want to know, Julien. Unless it’s your job and your responsibility. Doctors deal with death and worse, every day. It’s the part of the job no-one else wants to hear you talk about.”
“How dangerous can these patients be?” I said, as a particularly loud roar made the steel door tremble in its frame.
“Some patients have been here for years,” said Dr. Benway. “Some of them are more alien than others. Some contain whole worlds, other realities, inside them—living gateways to other places.”
“Think of the Trojan horse,” Julien said to me.
“We’ve spent years developing ways to help these people,” said Benway. “Of freeing them from the terrible burdens placed upon them. We use surgery to undo physical changes, telepaths to undo mental changes, and now and again we get our hands on some discarded alien tech that we can use to drag alien booby-traps out of human minds and souls. But sometimes the beings behind the changes fight back. Burke, Rabette, what have you . . . Dr. Rabette, you get your cowardly arse right back here, right now! And tell me what, exactly, is going on inside Ward 12A? Which patient is responsible for all this?”
“We don’t have a name,” muttered Rabette, not even trying to meet her gaze. “He’s John Doe X number 47.”
“Something inside him, or beyond him, is fighting to break through,” said Burke. His face was white with shock and wet with sweat. “Some other reality is using him as a gateway, to get to ours. And I really don’t think it’s any kind of reality we would want to meet.”
I looked sharply at Julien. “A hellgate. They’re talking about a hellgate, draining someone’s soul energies to create a doorway between one reality and another. Open a door and send through an army. Sneaky.”
Rabette broke and ran, and, a moment later, Burke was off and running, too. Julien shouted angrily after them but stopped when Benway put a hand on his arm.
“They’re only interns, Julien. Only been on Ward 12A a few months. This is way above their pay grade. Let them go; they wouldn’t be much use anyway.”
“Don’t you have any experienced security people to deal with situations like this?” I said.
“Of course, ex-Fortress, mostly. But the security doors are down, remember?” said Benway. “Security are trapped on the other side of the Hospice.”
“Well, why don’t you keep some here, on hand?” I said.
“Budget cuts,” said Dr. Benway, not quite looking in Julien’s direction.
“All right, the committee were wrong, and yes, you did warn us,” said Julien. “I promise I’ll bring it up at the next meeting! Can we concentrate on the problem in front of us, please?”
“So,” I said, as cheerfully as possible under the circumstances. “It’s down to us to save the day. Again. Where do we start?”
Benway looked at Julien. “Is he always this cocky?”
“Usually,” said Julien. “One of the reasons I suggested he be made Walker. He really does have a lot of experience in saving the world against impossible odds. But don’t stand too close to him while he’s doing it. Dr. Benway, question. Do we have any idea who these invading aliens are? Do we have a name, or even a species description? Any idea at all of what they are or where they’re from?”
“No,” said Benway. She looked through the porthole again, and winced. “The patient couldn’t tell us anything, including his own name. Diagnostic equipment revealed his condition but not who or what caused it. If this were a standard possession or alteration, the Ward’s own defences and protections would have kicked in; so I can only assume this is something a lot more powerful than we’re used to.”
Julien frowned, tapping his chin thoughtfully with one knuckle. “The Authorities keep a watchful eye on the various Timeslips as they come and go in the Nightside because they’re the most common launching sites for an invasion, but if these aliens have found a new way to open new doors, less obvious than Timeslips . . . we could be in real trouble. We have to stop this invasion here, slap it down hard, and send the aliens a message they won’t forget in a hurry.”
“Oh, I can do that,” I said.
Julien glared at me. “Preferably a message that will still leave the Hospice intact and standing afterwards!”
“All right, I got it!” I said. “Honestly, you blow up one lousy building, and they never let you forget it . . .”
I edged closer to the steel door. Terrible sounds rose and fell on the other side, and awful lights flared through the porthole. Whatever was happening in there was escalating. I reached out one hand to touch the doo
r, and my fingers sank right into the steel. As though the solid metal were nothing more than soft mud. I snatched my hand back. The soft, pulsating mass that had been solid steel started to stretch after me, then fell back again.
“What the hell was that?” said Benway, clearly shaken.
“I’ve encountered this before,” I said, a little freaked-out. I held my hand up before my eyes and shook it back and forth, checking for signs of damage. My fingers tingled unpleasantly, odd and eerie sensations prickling up and down them in sudden runs. “Remember when the Springheel Jack Meme broke through from another dimension, Julien? The starting point was an old door in an abandoned warehouse, down on Damnation Row. By the time I got there, the whole wall was affected, rising and falling like a heartbeat. The physical reality there had been softened, eaten away, weakened from the other side. The far side of our reality, that we can never see. The very solidity of our world undermined from the other side, so they could break through. In that case, what came through was a supernatural meme, a curse or possession that spread like a virus, overwriting everyone it touched.
“We’re at Ground Zero, people; this isn’t just an invading army. A whole other reality is trying to break through and overwrite us, replace this world with their own. This door is less real than it should be because something else is becoming more real. The patient inside Ward 12A is being physically and spiritually remade into a doorway. But that takes a lot of power, which means it isn’t up to speed yet. We’ve still got some time.”
Dr. Benway looked at Julien. “Do you understand anything he’s saying?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” said Julien. “Are you sure about this, John?”
“Of course I’m not sure! This is all inspired guess-work! If you’ve got a better and less worrying idea, I for one would love to hear it!”
“Knew I should have kept you away from the brandy,” said Julien.
He leaned in close to study the steel door, almost but not quite pressing his nose against the metal. “The door is becoming permeable, all the strength and purpose being sucked right out of it, to help fuel the forming gateway. Which means we’re not locked outside after all.”
He pressed both of his hands against the door and pushed hard. His hands sank deep into the soft metal, disappearing up to the wrists. Julien’s face convulsed, lips skinning back from his teeth in a pained grimace. He pushed with all his strength, but the door wouldn’t budge. Julien gave up and tried to pull his hands back, then found that he couldn’t. Benway and I grabbed an arm each and threw our whole weight backwards; and Julien’s hands burst back out of the door with horrible, wet, sucking sounds. He staggered backwards, clutching his hands to his chest. Dr. Benway made him stand still while she checked them for damage, but apparently it was really bad pins and needles from returning circulation. The soft door had sucked all the living warmth right out of them.
“How the hell do we get in?” said Julien, through gritted teeth. “Blow a hole in the wall?”
“Amateur,” I said, not unkindly.
I raised my gift, focused on the door, and found the door-handle. My gift locked onto it, onto the basic reality of the door-handle itself, and forced it to be real and hard and solid. And then it was the easiest thing in the world for me to reach out, grasp the door-handle, and open the door. The locks and seals were as soft and weak as everything else now, and the door opened easily under my guiding will. The door started to swing inwards, then gave up its remaining ghost and fell apart into thick wisps of grey fog, already dispersing on the starkly lit air. I was left with only the door-handle in my hand. I carelessly let it drop to the floor and strode confidently into Ward 12A.
The whole room was full of flaring bright lights, sharp and incandescent, acutely painful to the human eye. Great clouds of flailing energies boiled this way and that, discharging violently against anything they touched. One whole wall had become wet and sticky, all the shades of red, pulsing like the insides of something alien. The ceiling seemed to be miles overhead, and the floor felt untrustworthy under my feet. Walking into the Ward was like pushing against a fierce wind, an almost solid intervention of some Outside will. I could feel Space itself stretched taut by some unimaginable influence. I stopped, despite myself, struggling to get my bearings. There were too many directions, too many dimensions inside Ward 12A now, too many ways to look, too many options to deal with. Another reality had been added to ours, superimposed on it, making the world heavier and more complex than it was ever supposed to be. The red wall was full of something like maggots, writhing and twisting. There were dark holes in the floor, dropping away forever. And rising over everything, a horrible feeling, a terrible conviction, that something was coming.
Far-away, from Outside or beyond our universe, I could hear something screaming, an endless howl of rage and hate. Drawing steadily, remorselessly closer.
And right there before me, hanging in mid air, was patient John Doe X 47, or what was left of him. His Humanity had been ripped away. His body was gone. He had been subtracted from the world and made into something else, and now he was a living tear in reality. A human gap, a human shape full of something that hurt my eyes to look at. A way in for whatever wanted in. I forced myself to look away, to check on what had happened to the other patients trapped in Ward 12A. I knew Julien would want to know. I could see all the beds, and the patients in them; but they all seemed far-away, distant, on the other side of the world. Looking across the Ward, across all its hideously stretched Space, was like looking across the universe. Trying to concentrate on the patients was like trying to look in a new direction, one I could sense but not make sense of. They’d been pushed aside by what was happening, forced out of the way to make room for what was pushing in. I was pretty sure the patients were still alive. But I couldn’t tell if they were still human any more.
I yelled back to Julien and Dr. Benway at the doorway, telling them what I was seeing, trying to make sense of it. They’d managed to get inside the Ward but couldn’t force themselves any further in. They didn’t have my gift—to find a way forward, in the face of everything.
I concentrated, focusing my gift on the human-shaped gap in our world. I tried to reach into the gap, to find the link between the patients and the beings from Outside, so I could break it . . . but it only took me a moment to realise that the patient was the link. I couldn’t break the link without killing the patient. And I wasn’t ready to that. Not until I’d tried everything else I could think of first. I couldn’t sacrifice one life to save many. Julien wouldn’t approve. He always was a good influence on me, the bastard. So, since I couldn’t touch the alien influence, I found the man and grabbed on to him. I could feel him, held half-way between this world and the other. And the more I held on to him with my gift, the more real I found him, until finally it was the easiest thing in this world to haul him all the way back into reality. And suddenly there he was, hanging in mid air, where the gap used to be. One hundred per cent real and solid and human. I let go, and he fell to the floor. And so did the beings from Outside that had been attached to him, that I’d found and dragged into this world with him.
All of Ward 12A snapped back to normal. The light was soft and even, the awful howling was gone, and the room was room-shaped again, with only the three usual dimensions. Patient John Doe X 47 lay curled up in a ball on the floor, breathing harshly, eyes wide and staring. I’d rescued his body, but someone more experienced in these matters would have to bring his mind back after everything the poor bastard had been put through. I looked at the aliens I’d dragged through into our world, and my lip curled. Rewritten and restructured by the laws of our reality, there were floppy bits of meat, each the size of a man’s head, with protrusions that made no sense, squirming and oozing across the floor. They whined and squealed with every movement, as if being in our world hurt them. I only had to look at them to know they were suffering and dying, unable to withstand human conditions. One by one, they fell silent and lay still, and within mom
ents they were rotting and falling apart. I looked back at Julien as he came forward to join me.
“That enough of a message for you?”
“That will do nicely,” said Julien. “They’ll think twice before trying that again. You did well, John.”
“It’s a shame they died so quickly,” said Benway. “I wanted to stamp on them first.”
I had to raise an eyebrow. “Hard core, Doc.”
She surprised me with a brief, happy smile. “No-one messes with my patients and gets away with it.”
She moved over to the patient lying on the floor, knelt beside him, and spoke reassuringly to him as she checked his vital signs. He didn’t even know she was there.
“We are but flies to alien entities,” Julien said. “They use us for their sport.”
“Bastards,” Dr. Benway said succinctly, without looking up.
“You’re thinking of the Sun King, aren’t you?” I said quietly to Julien.
“Aren’t you?” said Julien.
Dr. Rabette and Dr. Burke stuck their heads through the open doorway, attracted by the reassuring quiet. Benway saw them as she stood up, beckoned them into Ward 12A, then drove them to check on the other patients with a furious glare and a fusillade of bad language. Most of the other patients seemed more confused than anything. Having been pushed so far-away, they hadn’t been affected by the released energies. Most of them were too preoccupied with their own problems anyway. And once I could see them clearly, I didn’t blame them.
One bed was full of three people who’d been mashed together in an ungainly tangle of limbs, their pallid flesh stretched taut, while three faces stared from different sides of the same head. I don’t know what their staring eyes saw, but I knew it wasn’t anything I wanted to see. A man sat stiffly upright on the next bed, strapped bodily to the headboard. Where his head should have been there was only a brightly shining star. Next to him, a woman squatted on her bed, held in a tightly reinforced strait jacket chained to the wall. Her eyes were simply evil. She laughed softly, continuously, waiting for the moment when someone would be stupid enough to release her. Something that might have been a man or a woman, once, lay in a pool of its own blood, bulky pieces of alien tech protruding through its cracked and broken skin.