Zod Wallop (29 page)

Gloria glared at Karl, who was sitting on the sofa next to Al Butts. “Really. A girl in a wheelchair and you have to bring her down with a tranquilizer gun. Two grown men.”

“We keep telling you,” Karl said, “she wasn’t in any wheelchair. She was walking down the beach. Anyway, you’re going to grind her up in a fine powder, what do you care if she’s even alive?”

Gloria Gill rolled her eyes and turned to Blaine for moral support. “Andrew, I am glad there are men like you in the world or I would despair of the sex. I would say they had no soul at all, none.” Gloria walked over to the laser scalpel and ran her hands over the polished machinery.

“Ms. Engel may not have the intellect to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge with her insights, but we all do her an injustice if we assume that she can’t appreciate the very real contribution she will be making. I think she deserves to participate fully in the historic moment.”

She plucked the laser scalpel from its clip and clicked it on. A small red beam of light speared the carpet. She clicked it off, instantly, and stared as a thread of gray smoke rose up from the floor. She giggled. “Andrew Blaine, come here and let me give you a hug. I ask you to do the impossible, and you trump it. This is just the thing. And Revel makes these! The gods have got to be smiling on us.”

Andrew Blaine walked across the room and took her in his arms and hugged her. He bit her ear and she squealed in merriment and the scalpel leapt out of her hand, bobbing lazily in the air on its long, stalked neck like some indulgent serpent.

“Please,” Gloria said, pushing him away, grabbing the scalpel, returning it to its clip, and brushing her dress demurely, “We aren’t alone.”

“You guys can go,” Blaine said, turning to Karl and Al.

“No problem,” Karl said, standing up. “You give us the money, we are on our way to the bank.”

Blaine’s eyes narrowed, sensing insubordination.

Karl kept grinning. “That was the understanding. I’m strictly contract. Me and Butts, we don’t get benefits or nothing.”

Gloria interrupted. “You all have to leave,” she said. “I’ve got work to do now. You menfolks will just be in the way.” She pointed imperiously at the door to the adjoining suite. “Adieu.”

“Come on,” Blaine said, returned to good humor by his paramour’s saucy manner. “You gentlemen do have to get your money, and Dr. Gill does have business to attend to.”

They walked through the door into the other room.

Gloria turned away and was pleasantly surprised to discover the girl staring at her. “Well, Emily Engel, you’re awake,” Gloria said. “About time, sleepyhead. I guess we can get started then.”

On the other side of room 317, a man, a woman, and a monkey crouched, listening.

“This is the room,” Rene whispered. “She just said Emily’s name.” Rene reached up and gripped the doorknob.

“It’s locked,” she said.

Allan stood up. “They’ll have another key at the desk,” he said.

Rene frowned. “They won’t give it to you.”

“Yes they will,” Allan said.

Rene smiled at her champion. “Yeah. Maybe they will.”

Gloria Gill approached the girl. “This won’t hurt at all,” she said. “First, I am going to drain your blood, which, of course, will be where we part company, as it were. It will be like falling asleep. I’m sorry, but I don’t have time for torture.” She giggled. “What’s that?”

The girl was opening her mouth.

Dr. Gloria Gill leaned closer. “Are you trying to say something, dear? I wasn’t aware that you spoke, but if you do, by all means share your thoughts with Dr. Gill.”

Gloria Gill jerked back. “Goodness,” she said. She laughed, a good sport. “I guess I asked for that. You nasty little cat.” The girl had spit in Gloria’s eye.

“I’ll just have to be careful, I guess, just…dear me.” She couldn’t see out of her left eye. Well, perhaps… She darted into the bathroom, jerked the tap on, and splashed water into the blind eye. Then she looked up in the mirror.

Her left eye had turned gray, gray with small, blue-black flecks. She could still make out the etched lines of pupil and iris…it was remarkably like an eye carved from stone. She touched her eye: slightly gritty, cold, heavy in the socket of her skull, and unmoored. She was struck with the queasy conviction that it could move, could roll…elsewhere.

No, the girl had tricked her mind. This was a trick of the mind, that’s all, and when the girl was dead the trick would collapse like a tent without poles.

Gloria left the bathroom. Her eye didn’t hurt, actually. She smiled at the girl whose ragamuffin head was turned to stare at her.
A prideful bitch
, Gloria thought. “I’m not impressed,” she said. “Although I am a little upset. I do believe that this sort of disrespect for science cannot go unpunished.” Gloria unhooked the scalpel. “No pain, no gain.”

The door swung open and a giant entered the room. Someone ran toward the gurney where Emily Engel lay.

Gloria recognized the giant now. One of the Ecknazine set. She clicked the laser beam on and swung it in a wide arc. She’d disembowel the bastard; he’d trip over his own steaming guts. Just watch this baby work.

Some creature leapt up to meet the burning beam, howled as it flayed the air, and seemed to explode in blood and burning fur, tumbling into Gill, knocking her back. The scalpel slipped through her fingers, spun away.

The dead monkey embraced her chest, its grinning death mask savagely triumphant.

She thrust the corpse from her and turned to flee.

“Andrew!” she screamed.
Where were they? Surely—
She saw the girl Emily Engel, freed from the gurney, standing with her back against the door to the adjoining room, her arms raised like a kid’s crossing guard, just a frail, teenage girl, her expression one of concentration, as might befit such an office, quietly holding the door against the hurled bodies of the men on the other side.

Then someone caught Dr. Gloria Gill by the arm and lifted her, and she looked down as she flowed smoothly through the air and saw herself plummeting headfirst toward the steel dissecting table.

Allan turned away from her crumpled body and saw Rene coming toward him.

“Allan,” she said, “you are the—Allan!” She was screaming now, running toward him with her hands out. Allan saw it: a red blur of neon, it drifted by once, twice, three times, mosquito bites. She came rushing at him and pushed him down, an easy task for his legs had turned to liquid and there was blood in his mouth and he was going to…

Rene grabbed the bobbing scalpel and shut it off. She dropped to her knees again. Allan’s throat seemed a scarf of blood. There was a dreamy look in his eyes, as though he still didn’t get it, didn’t fucking get it. The moron.

Rene screamed at the ceiling.

Downstairs in the lobby, the desk clerk looked up, not realizing that he was the last link between two very tentative realities. He was preparing to call the police. Some big jerk had leaned over the counter, grabbed the key to room 317, and said, “Emergency” like you could say “Emergency” and do something illegal, it was some magic password or something. The desk clerk had his hand on the phone when he saw the man and woman enter the lobby. The woman was expensively dressed but wore no shoes. The man was tall and moved with an odd, jointed gait that was disconcerting. He seemed to be wrapped in a cloud of smoke, and one hand did, in fact, hold three burning cigarettes.

They approached the desk.

“We are returned,” the man said.

The desk clerk said his last words. “I’m sorry, but there is no smoking in this building.”

Roald Peake picked up the letter opener that lay just the other side of the counter, and stabbed the man through the eye, killing him instantly. The lobby of the St. Petersburg Arms disappeared and Castle Grimfast shivered into focus, apocalypse lizards skittering across the damp stone floor that stretched into gray shadows. In the distance, three of the Less-Than tortured a Wire Kitten with sharp sticks. Their laughter echoed hollowly through the moist air, the sound you’d get from beating a rusty oil drum.

“Oh, it’s good to be home,” Lord Draining said, inhaling the scent of Mal Ganvern.

Gabriel was not to be distracted. “Where is my son?” she demanded.

Castle Grimfast took possession upstairs too, and Rene watched the walls turn to dirty gray. Her beloved’s blood now leaked into a faded rug of some ancient design. All the gleaming lab equipment was gone and Gloria Gill lay prone on the floor, garbed in layers of black—the dowager, of course, she was the Black Dowager—and in the tarlike shadows, steel, razor-clawed creatures rattled fitfully.

Emily Engel, with no reason to bar a door that no longer existed, moved away from the wall and looked at her surroundings with grim satisfaction.

“All the Believers are here,” she said.

H
ARRY
H
AD
B
EEN
speaking to Robert Furman immediately before looking up and seeing Jeanne running toward him.

They had been coming up the wide, carpeted stairs that ascended from the lobby to the first floor, and Furman had been saying, “When you wrote this original
Zod Wallop
that you speak of, it must have been a group effort—a kind of
channeling
, to use a word in some disrepute, but one that seems to define the phenomenon. So it is colored by Raymond and Rene and Emily and Allan and—probably to its artistic misfortune—myself. And we all have our counterparts in the story, I suppose.”

Harry nodded as the walked down the hall. “Oh yes. Rene is the court beauty, Eve, and Raymond is a wizard named Mettle and Emily is the Frozen Princess and you are the Duke of Flatbend.” Harry paused then, struck by a question so obvious that he wondered why he hadn’t—and he
hadn’t
—given it any thought. “Who am I?”

“Beg your pardon?” Furman said, stopping and looking at Harry.

“I mean, in
Zod Wallop
. If everyone else has a counterpart, then—”

“I should think that was quite clear,” Furman said. “That is, I’m assuming the published version is a reworking of the original version. In both you are, after all, the author. You are Blodkin.”

Blodkin
! Mad, ineffectual deity, besotted with self-importance, obsessed with the rituals of his worship, self-involved on a cosmic level.

Harry had no time to reflect on the answer, for it was then that Jeanne burst from her room. Harry, looking away from Furman at the sound of the door banging open, turned, saw her, and ran to her. They held each other and Jeanne shouted in his ear—somehow she needed to shout for the hall was filled with a roaring wind. “I’ve seen Amy. She fears you want to change—”

A black thunder rolled over her words, and Harry looked up to see the walls of the St. Petersburg Arms shimmer into stone. The skulls of grotesque beasts with corkscrew tusks were bolted to the walls, retreating in a line down either side of the long hall. Balanced on each tusk was a glowing orb, the source of its light being, Harry knew, the blood of a Swamp Grendel.

I’m in Grimfast
, Harry thought.

He turned and saw a man approaching him in a flowing robe. For a moment he did not recognize Raymond in the pointed hat, the ridiculous robe, and exaggerated mustache.

“The Contest is at hand, my Lord. I fear the Princess has awakened too early and may be ruled by her rage. Still, we must strive.”

A scream of terrible sadness and loss arose and Raymond looked up to the floor above. “Quickly,” he said, taking Harry’s arm.

Harry saw the troubled faces of Jeanne and Helen and Furman. They looked to him for some answer, their eyes full of fear and confusion. “We are in Zod Wallop, in Grimfast, the castle of Lord Draining,” he said. “I don’t know why or how.”

Harry saw that they wore the costumes of his imagination: Helen in her voluminous, green dress and jangle of turquoise jewelry, Furman in his parody of splendor and heaped honors, multicolored ribbons and large gold and silver medals, and Jeanne—Jeanne wore a dress of some golden metallic hue that had no place in Zod Wallop or anywhere else. Harry looked down at his own body and saw that he wore what he had been wearing before (jeans, a T-shirt) and thought,
Why not
? God shouldn’t have to nod to fashion.

The mournful cry came again and Raymond shouted. “My Lord. All haste. Please!”

They ran up the stairs in the wake of the wizard.

Rene was aware that someone was touching her shoulder. She turned and looked up at Emily.

“He was always pissed off about something,” Rene said. “Always angry. I would have been cool with it, though, just waited it out. It wasn’t ever meanness, you know. There wasn’t anything small about Allan, not anything small and mean like most people. We would have been all right, Allan and me, because…” Rene looked down at her beloved and pressed a hand to his forehead, as though checking for a fever. “Okay, he was a fuck-up. You meet some guy in a nut ward, he’s maybe going to have some personal problems. But, you know what? My heart beat faster the first time I saw him. I think that counts for some goddam something, don’t you? I think—” Rene paused, coughed, looked up again into Emily’s amazing eyes.