The Very Last Days of Mr Grey (19 page)

“Those were dreams. We never spoke, just our minds. Here, in the real world— Well, things are different.”

“I wouldn’t think the dead would have to worry about languages.”

Martynn scoffed at him. “I don’t look that bad.” He entered the stairwell. Mason followed. It twisted and turned much like the halls of this place, but they were finally deposited on the bottom, and came out into a much more spacious room.

Martynn shoved Mason back into the stairwell, but it was far too late.

“Hey!” a voice shouted. Footsteps approached.

Martynn looked down at himself, at the unbuckled straitjacket. “Should have thought of that. I’m just so used to it.”

Mason couldn’t see the room or who was approaching from this position, and hadn’t gotten a good look before he’d been pushed back, so asked, “What is it?”

“The helpers.” The way he said it made it clear they were of little help—at least to him. He looked past Mason, up the stairwell. “Go—” But a door above them opened, followed by rapid footsteps. “Dammit.”

“How far away were they?” Mason asked.

“I’ll go first, you follow.”

“Why?”

Martynn looked at him. “You’re faster.” Then he dashed out. Dashed was an exaggeration.

Mason followed, and had gotten three steps before someone slammed into him from behind. He managed to roll over onto his back, and the man—the helper—managed to stay on top.

The man’s face changed from anger to confusion as he got a look at Mason’s face. “Who are you?”

“Your nightmare.” Mason brought his knee up, hard. He cringed when it connected, but not as much as the helper did, who fell to the floor crying, curling up into a ball around his own aching—

Mason scrambled to his feet and once again after Martynn, who was just disappearing through a door. He caught up quickly, bursting through the door to come upon two men now wrestling with Martynn, using the dangling sleeves of his jacket as leashes.

He was so focused on this, that he didn’t see the other helper come at him from the side.

The man grabbed Mason in a bear hug, apparently less surprised than his earlier compatriot had been by Mason’s appearance.

Mason struggled, but couldn’t break free.

“Calm down,” one of the men wrestling with Martynn said. “Don’t make us spike you.”

And somehow, Mason knew what this meant. Lobotomize.

“Who’s that?” Another helper asked, coming from somewhere Mason didn’t see, pointing at Mason.

“Dunno,” the one bear-hugging Mason said. “He was helping that one escape.”

“Just get him sedated. We’ll figure it out later.”

Martynn struggled to face Mason. “Mr Grey! If you let them win, you’ll never see Eila again.”

“Calm down old man,” a helper shouted at him.

Isla, Mason thought, and felt the shatter.
EiIs
llaa
. He looked at the man holding him, realized the man was trying to bring him to the ground, and had been for some time now. Mason tilted his head.

Then he spread his arms, and the man flew away with a sickening pop. He landed, screaming, in a heap, cradling his arm in his lap, which dangled loosely from its socket.

Mason looked at the men who now had Martynn on the ground; looked at the other one, who had been approaching the downed man with a large metal syringe, but who was now frozen, looking at where the helper Mason had thrown had landed and now lay whimpering.

Mason took all this in, and frowned. They meant nothing. They were no one.

Mason pulled his shoulders back, tensed them. His entire back rippled with the force, and he felt his face draw down in sympathy. Then he thrust his hands forward and the air itself bent and redirected itself, all the atoms reconfiguring into one coherent whole with two distinct targets.

The two men atop Martynn were sent spinning into the walls, which cracked and broke.

The one with the syringe stopped approaching, looked at Mason, then dropped the needle and ran.

Mason went to Martynn’s side. “Are you okay?”

“They didn’t spike me, that’s a positive thing.” He sat up, looked around. Then he smiled at Mason.

“How much further?”

Martynn pointed. “That’s the entrance. If I recall right, there’s a lobby, where fronts are put on and facades are kept up. Then it’s the outside.” He frowned. “It’s been so long…”

Mason nodded. “Let’s go.” He helped him up, and they headed to the door.

“Maybe you should open it,” Martynn said, looking at the downed men.

Mason didn’t hesitate.

The room this door opened to was the largest yet, larger than the large corridor they just exited from. The ceiling was at least three stories in the air, and large doors led outside—or so it seemed to Mason.

A desk spanned a distance of forty feet or more. Behind it, several men and a few women were busy. There was a small line on the other side of the desk. A couple kids, and an older man at the rear. And at the front, two men Mason recognized.

They were talking with a man in some kind of strange looking hospital scrubs as he shuffled through files.

The agents looked up as Mason and Martynn entered.

Mason realized he could see their expressions, and wondered if it was this place. As he watched, he could distinctly make out first the shock, then the satisfaction on their faces.

“Looks like we won’t need your assistance after all,” the one with a bandage poking out from his vest said.

They looked different to Mason, less imposing, smaller. “Go,” he told Martynn. “I’ll handle them.”

Martynn didn’t wait to be told again, and dashed for the door—and this time, it was no exaggeration.

Mason followed after him slowly, keeping his head turned to watch the agents, who were approaching on a diagonal. They were around twenty feet away now.

Mason heard one of the children in line call for her father, and he quickly glanced her way. Maybe she sensed these weren’t good men. That was okay, Mason wouldn’t give them the chance to harm her if they’d had that in mind.

“Where do you think you’re going?” one of them said.

“Home.” Mason stopped. “And you’re staying here.” It took Mason a moment to work out it was Fredriks who had spoken, since they looked different here. Mason almost didn’t recognize them. Almost.

Ehd looked at his partner. “Hear that? We’re staying.”

“Well,” Fredriks responded, “then he is too.”

“I think you’re right.”

They charged the remaining distance quickly, but nowhere near as quickly as Mason had come to expect from them. Ironically, their slowness stunned him enough that they were able to slam into him, sending him to the floor.

Mason twisted and kicked. Suddenly the weight was off him. He opened his eyes, and saw the men getting up from the floor, several feet away, drawing guns. Large, strange looking guns, different then he’d seen them carry before. But guns were guns, after all.

Crap, he thought, got up, and ran toward the door.

A shot rang out and then Mason was outside, running toward Martynn, who was stopped and facing him.

“Mr Grey…” he gaped at Mason.

“Come on,” Mason said. The world was crazy, like a video game world with the draw distance set to
LOW
, and it was giving him vertigo.

“You’re shot.”

Mason looked down at his chest. He chuckled. “Just the stitches. Must have burst open.”

“Stop!”

Mason and Martynn turned to look at the agents, who both had their weapons trained on them. Behind the agents, still exiting the building, were several helpers, followed by the two children, and the older man who appeared to be trying to get the children back inside.

“Get—” one of the agents began, but then he stopped, looking up at the sky.

Soon everyone but Mason and Martynn were looking that way.

Martynn turned and looked. Mason continued looking at the blood draining from his chest. The stitches had really torn.

“Oh dear Crown,” Martynn muttered.

Mason turned and looked at the man, face turned skyward. Mason followed his gaze.

In the sky was a dark form. It moved like nothing Mason had seen. Fire spewed from its front and fog twirled around its rear, pulled forward by its slipstream and monumental mass. It emerged from that great wall of fog like some demon god of myth. It was too large to believe it to be flying.

But it is
.

The blunder
, Mason thought. His hand went to the wound in his chest.
The blunder turned… Dreaming Blunderbuss
. He was dreaming. The thing in the sky was a nightmare, but it was his. He understood this now, grasped this most basic of concepts. An axiom that the world chose to believe, to take as a given. To believe to be true despite the fundamentally absolute inability to prove that it was.

He grabbed Martynn by the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Martynn was pulled easily. Mason stumbled forward, no destination but away from this place. He heard screaming, the child calling for her father. But he knew the agents would follow him.

He blinked his eyes rapidly as the day grew darker. He looked up, expecting to see the impossibility. But he saw nothing, only heard its scream, once, then silence.

He could see the sun. Then why was it getting dark?

Martynn put an arm around Mason, preventing him from falling. When had Mason stopped pulling
him
?

“You need rest, medical help. You need to make us a door!”

“A door,” Mason said. He looked at his feet. They seemed all tangled up, incapable of supporting his weight.

“Yes!”

Mason took a breath that smelled of green. He held it. Then he looked up. “There.” The breath left him with the word in a cloud of light. Mason pulled away, and stumbled forward into the door that appeared from nowhere. He opened it and fell through, Martynn close behind him.

Following Mason through the ghost town they’d just stumbled into, Martynn watched the man who had saved him bleed out in front of him, stumbling aimlessly, doors appearing then disappearing as he fell this way and that. Martynn stayed close, in case Mason fell, and so he wouldn’t get left behind.

Mason took one of the doors, seemingly at random, and they left the dark, abandoned town and arrived in the Fog.

Martynn looked around, and knew it was not somewhere he wanted to be. Forests blazed with blue-green flames in the near distance, and large shapes moved in the shadows of the Fog.

It wasn’t beyond the Fog, but it was as far as Martynn had ever physically traveled.

Mason slammed into a door. It swung open and he fell through.

Then it began to shut, and Martynn dashed through it before it had the chance.

Now they were on a beach, looking out onto foggy outcroppings of ocean.

Above them in the distance hovered something even larger than the flying impossibility that had allowed them their escape. It was something the likes which Martynn had never seen nor imagined. It was nothing from Alterra. It was too alien, too incomprehensible.

He was so taken by this sight, that it was the slamming of the door that alerted him to the disappearance of Mason into another world.

Martynn ran to the door, feeling slow, his body not used to the exertion. He tried the handle. It turned, but the door didn’t open. He banged on it. “Mr Grey! Mr Grey!” He banged. “Mason!”

His banging faded as the door slowly dissipated. Soon he was hitting air. Instead of a door, he was now staring at a fog covered ocean. He wondered if that was where the great whale dwelt.

He fell, limp, to the sand. He had been so close. So close to seeing Serafina again. And now, now he was stuck here.

He scowled. No, he wasn’t going to give up. There was still hope, still the Guile. He could go back there, find them again. He didn’t know how he would get down there, but he knew there were tunnels. Tunnels no one had successfully navigated.

He would just have to be the first.

Yes, he—

Someone grabbed his shoulder.

He spun, hitting their hand away, but it was like hitting rock. “Ow!” He withdrew his hand and looked at his assailant—who was nothing of the sort.

“How’d you get ahead of me?” Mason asked. His shirt was almost completely red.

This time, Martynn kept a tight grip of Mason’s shoulder as he traveled through the doors.

Mason didn’t appear to know where he was going, but assuming the doors were finite, they would have to eventually reach their destination.

Who says they are finite?
, a voice whispered in Martynn’s ear. He turned to look at Mason, but Mason seemed oblivious. Martynn used his free hand to wipe his face. Don’t lose it now, he thought. He hadn’t made it this far to quit from exertion.

They went through many doors, Martynn constantly looking over his shoulder for pursuers, but he never saw any. In fact, he saw no one at all, until they went through a particular door, which looked like all the others—perhaps more grey than the rest—and found themselves in the middle of a city.

At first, Martynn thought it was Waldron’s Gate and panicked. But then he saw its inhabitants. Creatures twice the height of a man, with scaled skin of blue or green. Others who looked enough like men, except for their height and ears that were pointed like a dog’s.

There were humans as well, but none seemed bothered by the strange inhabitants of their city.

Maybe the city isn’t theirs
, Mason whispered.

Martynn looked at him again, but saw he hadn’t spoken, at least not in Martynn’s ear, as he was now about to walk through the door to a shop, several feet away. Martynn looked at his hand, which was holding not Mason’s shoulder, but air.

That’s no shop
.

Martynn ran, his disused legs aching, his feet burning, begging for relief, begging to stop and just sit down here, in this place so much like home.

He ran into one of the tall, scaled creatures in his rush.

“Sorry!” it screamed after him. He ignored it.

Mason opened the door. Martynn tripped, stumbled. Mason stepped through the door. Martynn’s arms pinwheeled. The door began to close and Martynn was pitched headlong into it.