* * *
Oliver’s lungs heaved with the effort of climbing the winding steps cut into the side of the mountain. This route of ascent toward the nightmare city was not designed for travelers of human proportions. Each uneven tread and riser was hacked into the rock with a creature of far greater size in mind. As such, each step required considerable effort to climb. The dying red sun did not move in the sky and the shadows never changed, fixed forever in unchanging aspect and making the discernment of the passage of time impossible. They had climbed for what seemed like an eternity, rising hundreds of feet into the mountain, yet the city of the dead seemed no closer. The crooked tower loomed over them like a grim sentinel, daring them to approach its cyclopean immensity with the promise of escape.
“Does that bloody thing ever get closer?” asked Finn, echoing Oliver’s thoughts.
“It must,” said Kate, dropping to her knees and taking gulping breaths between each word, “if we keep climbing toward it then it must draw nearer.”
Oliver shook his head as he stopped for breath. “The customary universal laws don’t seem to apply here, Miss Winthrop. I suspect we will be able to trust nothing our eyes tell us in this place, least of all scale and distance.”
“Can we trust that?” said Finn, looking back down the oversized steps to the cliffs upon which they had first awoken to this new world. A dozen gray-skinned scavengers—the beasts that picked the bones of the giant cemetery clean—had gained the cliff and were circling and sniffing the dusty ground in search of prey. One of the beasts let out a baleful screech and bounded toward the base of the steps, moving with feline grace and agility.
“Not again,” said Oliver. “Will I never be free of these damned ghouls?”
They climbed on, each step an ordeal as the ghouls scrambled over the square-cut steps far below them, squealing and braying in anticipation of fresh meat and warm blood.
“Hurry up, folks,” said Finn. “Those things are bloody fast, y’know.”
Oliver struggled to keep up with Finn. The Irishman had clearly kept fit through his nefarious activities as a bootlegger, but Oliver found himself and Kate falling behind with every passing moment. Numerous expeditions to foreign lands had kept Oliver trim and wiry, but only now was he beginning to appreciate how his stamina had waned since his last trip.
“Too much time in the library,” he said to Kate. “Not enough on the playing field.”
“Too much time in the lab,” she wheezed. “None on the playing field.”
Oliver put an arm around her shoulders and helped her up another step. “Come on, Kate. As you say, that tower must be getting closer now, eh?”
She smiled weakly, but Oliver saw she didn’t really believe him. He looked back down the steps. The ghouls had closed half the distance already. The cannibal beasts would be upon them within minutes at their present rate of pursuit.
“Where’s Finn?” gasped Kate. “I don’t see him.”
Oliver craned his neck along the length of the winding steps, hoping to see Finn looking down at them with a wisecrack or a curse on his lips, but the Irishman had vanished.
“I don’t see him,” said Oliver as an unsettling suspicion settled in his belly.
“He’s left us, hasn’t he?”
“No, I expect he’s just scouting ahead or something.”
Kate gave him a dubious look, and Oliver’s heart sank. Finn had abandoned them to make his own way up the cliffs, leaving them in his wake to distract the ghouls long enough for him to reach the tower and home. Oliver supposed he couldn’t blame the man, but he had hoped common decency would overcome his “natural” criminal tendencies.
He and Kate struggled onward, each oversized step a trial to climb and each one gained a small victory. Oliver could hear the whooping barks of the ghouls behind them, and tried not to imagine the pain of being eaten alive. Claws scrabbled on stone and angry yelps sounded as the flesh-eaters fought past one another to be the first to claim the meat prize.
Oliver had nothing at all with which to defend himself, save his fists, but he was no pugilist. Kate disentangled herself from his helping arm and curled herself into a tight ball as the screeching yelps of the ghouls echoed like the chittering of bats off the rocky walls. Oliver turned toward the pack of beasts, determined to at least face them on his feet. He looked over his shoulder with one last hope that Finn might be there, but there was nothing to see except more steps.
He almost laughed as he saw how close they had come to their goal.
The crooked tower split the sky above him, its base surely just around a spur of glassy obsidian. Was this world mocking them now, teasing them with the dream of escape only to snatch it away at the last moment? Oliver let the anger come, and balled his fists.
The first ghouls came into sight on the steps below, predatory things of pallid, rugose skin stretched too tight over their bony frames and large skulls. Maws filled with flat, yellow teeth jutted from distended jaws and brackish saliva drooled over lipless mouths. To feast on corpses was merely existence, but a feast of living flesh was the choicest sweetmeat.
There was no finesse to their attack, the creatures bounding over one another in their desperation to feed. Dirty claws reached for Oliver and Kate, but before they tore the skin from their bodies, a wild, ululating war cry echoed from the mountains. Like Cúchulain himself, Finn leapt through the air and landed on the step beside Oliver. He held a long spar of broken wood, and there was a wildness in his eyes that reminded Oliver of the Yopasi warriors as they gave him a demonstration of their fighting style.
The timber spar lashed out and caved in the first ghoul’s skull. The reverse stroke broke the neck of another. A monster leapt at Finn, but he swung the timber around and slammed it into its spread jaws. Blood and teeth flew, and the beast dropped alongside its fallen kin.
“Go, Doc!” yelled Finn. “Get the lass up and run! The tower’s just up ahead now. I can hold them here for a time.”
Oliver wanted to tell Finn not to be so stupidly heroic, but knew that he and Kate would never escape without such bravery. He nodded, galvanized by Finn’s actions, and picked Kate up as the timber slammed down on another ghoul’s head.
“Come on, ye shower o’ worthless devils! Take more than you ugly bastards to get past this son of Erin!”
Another ghoul went down as Finn swung his ad hoc weapon like an axe-wielding logger. A ghoul’s ribs were splintered, and another had its arm broken before they were finally able to draw some of Finn’s Irish blood. A claw hooked in under the spar and ripped across his thigh. A wash of red spilled down Finn’s leg, and he dropped to one knee with a cry of pain.
Oliver finally reached the top step. The breath heaved in his lungs and his heart hammered the inside of his ribcage. Clear of the steps, he saw the impossible tower rising up to the stars, its ragged flanks glittering and uneven like the napped flint spearhead of primitive man.
A vast archway led within and an ancient door of rotten wood hung on rusted hinges. Together Oliver and Kate struggled toward the entrance, the nearness of home giving their tired limbs a new burst of energy. As they reached the door, Oliver saw a portion of it had been broken off with a fist-sized rock.
“So that’s where he got his weapon.”
“What?”
“He wasn’t going to leave us,” said Oliver. “He was arming himself.”
Finn’s wild yells of battle drifted from below and Oliver’s guilt weighed down on him like the albatross of Coleridge’s tale of the Ancient Mariner. Oliver pushed Kate toward the tower and said, “You have to go, Miss Winthrop. Get home and tell the others what happened here.”
“What are you talking about, Oliver? Come on, we need to go!”
“I can’t leave Finn like this,” said Oliver, turning and running back to the steps.
Before he reached them, Finn came into view. The man’s chest and legs were savagely clawed and the skin of his cheek hung loose like a flap of cloth. Oliver blanched as he
realized he could see the man’s teeth through the hole torn in his face.
“Coming back for me, Doc?” said Finn, his voice a wet gargle of blood.
“Yes,” said Oliver. “Christ Almighty, Finn. Look at the state of you!”
“Aye, but you should see the state o’ the damn ghouls,” said Finn, spitting a mass of bloody teeth. “They’ll not soon forget Finn Edwards in these here parts. Now what do you say we be getting outta here. I gave the first lot a good hiding, but there’s plenty more coming up behind them, an I think I might have a bit of a job seeing them off too, you know?”
“Absolutely,” said Oliver, humbled at Finn’s selfless courage in defending them.
“I almost didn’t come back for ye,” said Finn, shaking his head. “Damnedest thing. I got to that there door and I was all set to climb to the top when I swear I heard the voice of me dead mam saying, ‘Finn, lad, if you don’t go back for them folks, I’ll skelp your backside till it’s red raw, dead or no.’ And trust me, that woman had a mean right hand on her.”
Oliver didn’t know what to make of that, so he kept his mouth shut as he helped Finn through the door. The man had lost a lot of blood and had suffered a great many deep gouges all over his body. God only knew what kind of filth or diseases those creatures carried beneath their claws, and the sooner he could be seen by a doctor the better.
The inside of the tower was hollow, its walls uniformly smooth and polished to a mirrored sheen. Vague, suggestive shapes swam in the capricious reflections thrown back by the ambient phosphorous light of this world. Glittering fog filled the space, and Kate was waiting for them on the bottom step of the tower’s stairs. Unlike the corkscrewing staircase that had brought them here, these steps were more human-sized in their dimensions, built into the inner face of the tower and spiraling up its length.
They raced upward as quickly as possible, bearing the weight of the injured Finn between them and keeping close to the reflective walls. The Irishman was leaking blood with alarming rapidity, and his bravado grew less vocal the higher they climbed. Oliver looked down as he heard a bellowing roar from below, a terrifying cry that could not have come from the ghouls. Something giant blundered in the glittering mist, a towering beast with slate gray flesh and a muscular, simian-like frame.
Its barrel-sized head turned upward and its jaw spread wide as it loosed a deafening bellow of rage. Oliver almost dropped Finn in terror. The beast’s jaw, in defiance of all other creatures on God’s Earth, opened vertically, a fang-filled gash that split its face down its length. A pair of broad arms swung at its heavily muscled shoulders, but at the elbow, each arm split apart to form two furred paws that ended in vicious claws.
Kate screamed at the sight of the monster, and the fragile courage Oliver had built after their survival against the ghouls evaporated in the face of this new horror. What manner of beast could defy the basic principles of evolution so blatantly? Its anatomy was proof of the lunacy of this terrible world, and Oliver struggled to hold onto his diminishing ability to function.
The creature roared again, and something in the timbre of the sound told Oliver that this was not a roar of mindless animal hunger, but one of outrage, as though they had committed some hideous trespass within some sacred place. The giant monster lumbered onto the steps, but before it could climb higher, a dozen slavering ghouls swarmed through the tower’s open doorway and fell upon it.
The giant swatted them with its monstrous, clawed hands, but for every ghoul it plucked from its body and crushed, two more leapt onto his back or legs. Like prehistoric hunters working to bring down a mammoth, the ghouls snapped and bit and tore at the hideous giant, but before the outcome of the bloodshed was decided the mist closed in until all that could be heard was the bellowing roars and shrieking barks of the combatants.
“Are ye gonna stand around all day or get on with climbing this fekkin’ tower?” asked Finn groggily. “Cause that’d be just grand, folks.”
The very banality of Finn’s question spurred them to action, and leaving the sounds of the dreadful fight to the death behind, Oliver and Kate carried onward to the tower’s summit. Oliver feared that the sheer immensity of the tower’s height would defeat them, but once again the baffling geometries of this world confounded him. Though they could only have been climbing for ten minutes at most, the top of the tower was soon within sight.
A great stone trapdoor gaped above them and the weak light of the dying sun seeped into the tower. Oliver and Kate dragged Finn onto the roof, relieved beyond words to have finally made it here alive.
Nebulous fog surrounded the summit, blistering arcs of blue energy flashing randomly with colors beyond those of the conventional spectrum. With each burst of lightning, a faint vision of the world they had so recently left would shimmer in the depths of the iridescent mist. Some Oliver recognized, others he did not, but all were ill-favored places: tumbled churches long since abandoned, decaying graveyards, blasted heaths, or forgotten tenements where vagrants had died unnoticed and unmourned.
“So what now?” said Kate. “How do we get back home?”
“I’m not sure,” replied Oliver. “I was hoping that we would find another doorway similar to the one that brought us here.”
“Are you two thick as navvies?” slurred Finn. “There’s only one way to escape from the kingdom of the Sidhe.”
“What’s he talking about?” asked Kate.
“I fear he is delirious,” said Oliver, but Finn shook his head.
“You two are the professors, and here’s me the clever one. Who’d a thought it?”
With that, Finn shook off their supporting arms and lurched like a drunk at closing time toward the edge of the tower as another bolt of lightning flashed. A broken field of fallen tombstones and weeping angels worked in granite appeared within the clouds.
“Only one way home!” shouted Finn. “A leap of faith!”
The Irishman threw himself into the cloud and his body vanished with a bang of displaced air and a hiss of static. Oliver shouted Finn’s name, but the man was gone as surely as if he had never existed.
A bellowing roar issued from beyond the trapdoor: the terrible giant climbing toward them to cast them from its holy place.
Kate offered Oliver her hand and said, “Looks like it’s a leap of faith then.”
“I suspect you might be right,” replied Oliver.
Hand in hand they leapt into the glittering mist.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rex sat by the hospital bed, his head nodding as sleep kept sneaking up on him. The bustle from the nurses’ station down the hall had become a droning blur of hushed conversation, and the bitter cup of hospital coffee hadn’t helped him stave off his tiredness. Minnie sat next to him, resting her head on his shoulder, and he liked the easy intimacy of the gesture. She was a great gal, and Rex wondered why she’d never found herself a good man, and kept hanging around with him.
Alexander sat in a chair beside the door, while Stone paced the room, tapping his notebook against his thigh in a nervous tattoo.
Rex could understand his frustration.
Rita Young lay on the bed, her eyes closed and her body swathed in bandages. She hadn’t regained consciousness since collapsing in Oliver’s office, and the doctors had told them she was severely dehydrated and suffering borderline malnutrition. The many cuts and gashes on her arms and legs were also likely infected. All that could be done was to clean the wounds regularly and hope Rita’s own immune system could fight off the infection.
Rita had come back to them, but what of Amanda?
Rex doodled on his own notepad, the words coming unbidden from the depths of his subconscious.
Survivor
Visionary.
Key to the mystery.
But for good or ill?
Stone’s frustration was getting to Rex, the constant pacing, the grunts of impatience, and the constant tap, tap, tap of his notebook.
“Will you sit down, Gabriel?” said
Rex. “This cat on hot bricks routine is getting on my nerves.”
Stone flashed him an angry glare, and put away his notebook, but continued to pace up and down. Every now and then he would throw a glance at Rita and grunt. Rex shook his head and opened his mouth to chide Stone again.
“Rex, honey,” sighed Minne. “Leave it. Don’t poke the bear.”
“I heard that,” said Stone.
“You were meant to,” said Minnie, lifting her head from Rex’s shoulder. “The pair of you need to learn some patience instead of getting all riled up. Take a leaf out of Alexander’s book. You don’t see him getting all bent out of shape here.”
“I understand that there is little I can do to affect the outcome of Miss Young’s condition,” said Templeton. “War and its aftermath teaches a man to be sanguine about those things in life he cannot change”
“Rita’s gonna come out of this,” said Minnie, “and when she does, we’ll find out who took her and where they are.”
“And if Amanda dies in the meantime?” snapped Stone.
“Then we did the best we could.”
“That’s not good enough,” said Stone, bunching his fists, and Rex saw the volatile core of this man bubbling close to the surface. He realized he knew very little about Stone’s past, and saw that only an iron discipline kept the wild anger within him in check. “They took my Lydia, and I won’t let them take Amanda, too.”
“And we’re doing everything we can,” soothed Minnie, getting up and standing in front of Stone. She took the Pinkerton agent’s hands and Rex felt a sudden stab of jealousy that surprised him. “But it’s up to Rita now. She’s a strong girl. She managed to escape from the guys that held her prisoner, and that’s not nothing. She’s got guts most of us can only dream about, so I just know she’ll pull through. Okay? Have faith in her, Gabriel. For me.”
Stone nodded and cleared his throat, turning away as Rex saw a glimmer of moisture in his eyes. He took a seat on the opposite side of the bed and folded his arms across his broad chest. Rex let out a breath, feeling calmed by Minnie’s words himself. Rita was a fighter, that much was obvious from the cuts and bruises she’d sustained in her captivity and escape.