Crossroads (35 page)

When a jagged fork of lightning lit the cliffs he could have sworn that there was now no house there at all. Could the shack really have been blown away? He spun in time to watch the aft end of the boat lift as the
Mary O
slid down the backside of another roller, and for just an instant he thought he saw those terrible, inhuman faces within it again. Then a wall of rain pummeled him, obscuring everything but the dull glow from the pilothouse, and he gripped a lifeline, headed back inside.

Another
tinge
struck his heart. Sharper this time, taking his breath away. He reached for the bottle in his shirt pocket, but his hand slapped a flatness against his chest.

Gone.It must have fallen over the prow when I almost went in!

He had another bottle of nitro in his shack, but that was all the way down at the bottom of the island, a world and a storm away. It might as well have been behind the counter of the pharmacy in Rockport for all the good it would do him now. He gripped the lifeline in both hands, ignoring Silky’s worried look, taking deep breaths, willing away the pain, trying to relax.

Right. Relax while we’re about to founder in the biggest gale to hit the fucking island in fifty years maybe. But I can’t die out here now. Silky won’t know what to do if we drag an anchor or snap a rode. I can’t let him drown because of my stupid, fucking worthless old ticker.

The pain eased just a little, and he managed to drag himself along the line to the pilothouse steps, but every one of them was a mountain. Each of his legs weighed a ton, and he was tempted to reach down to lift them, but he couldn’t release the greasy pipe railings or he’d fall back onto the pitching deck and knock himself cold. When he finally landed on the top step he gripped the pilothouse door handle in a shaking hand and shoved it open, staggering inside too weak and gripped by pain to close the door behind him. Silky stumbled over and shut it for him, turning to grab him by the shoulders and ease him down to the deck. Clem sprawled there, splay-legged, gripping his chest, gasping for breath.

"Heart," he said.

"Shit," said Silky, kneeling in front of him. "Where’s your medicine?"

Clem nodded toward the prow. "Over the side."

"Shit," said Silky again.

"Be all right," gasped Clem, clenching his eyes shut.

Although it felt like someone was shoving a serrated knife into and out of his heart, his arms and legs were numb.
Everything
else was numb. Everything except his chest. And there was a huge steel band around it, too, tightening, cutting off his air. Each breath rasped louder than the engines and the squalling storm that seemed farther and farther away.

"Do you have any more medicine anywhere?" said Silky.

Clem shook his head. "Spare bottle... in the shack."

"I’ll have to go get it," shouted Silky, but to Clem his voice sounded far away, too.

"Can’t," gasped Clem. "Anchoring here, now, only chance."

"If you don’t get your medicine you’ll die."

Clem managed to wrap a quivering hand around Silky’s wrist and open his eyes enough to squint into the old man’s determined face. "You leave the
Mary O
be. Cut the anchor lines... we die."

"Gonna die, anyway," said Silky, jerking his hand away.

"Things in the water," muttered Clem, starting to drift.

The pain was easing, but not the way it did under the power of the nitro. Instead of coming back from some terrible brink that he couldn’t quite see, he felt as though he were sliding toward it, as though the pain were the crest of some invisible wave between this world and the next, and now he was on the far side cruising down that slippery slope toward some cold and unwelcoming arms. Or something that felt like arms.

"Can’t be," said a voice that echoed in the growing darkness. "Not in the water. We’re safe on the water."

You are not safe anywhere, now,
said another voice that Clem thought he recognized.

Chapter 47

The Encroachment reminded Kira of half-forgotten nightmares. For an instant in the distance she was certain she spotted a mountaintop that she remembered all-too well, but then it faded-or rather
melted-
into something else because everything around them just came and went. It was like walking through a misty world of shadows that seemed to form recognizable shapes, then-when you looked at them again-transformed into something totally different but always horrible to behold. Monster shapes, deep dark crevasses, looming skeletal arms, mounds of vermin laden filth and acres of disfigured bodies, and the sounds... There were moans and cries and screams and shrieks.

And sometimes there was the sense of falling, as though the ground beneath their feet-sometimes stone, sometimes grass or carpet or tile or whatever-were no more solidly supported than a leaf riding a gust of wind.

Weird, reptilian shapes soared in and out of the mist overhead, sometimes diving so close that the group had to duck to evade them. The beasts also emitted cries, only these were the calls of the hunter rather than the hunted, and in the darkness around them could be heard the sound of running feet. There was also a constant sense of being watched, of being followed, and the knowledge that they were lost beyond finding. Only Jen seemed unaffected by the horror of the place.

"Nightmares," whispered Kira. "I’ve been here."

"Everyone has," said the Elder. "This is what the Mogul has made of dreams. This is the only kind of creation the Mogul knows, the creation of despair, of destruction and death."

"Grief," said Jen. "Heartache. Suffering. Oppression. Persecution. Torture. Abuse. Destruction."

"Yes," agreed the Elder. "This is the world of the Mogul, and destruction is his greatest talent."

A gloomy house appeared cloaked in swirling shadows so that it seemed to melt and reform constantly before their eyes. It reminded Kira of the painted picture of the haunted mansion on the side of the tent in her family’s show with looming windows like dark, glaring eyes, and hulking eaves that made it seem ready to leap at them like another great beast of prey. Screams poured out of the dangling front door, and the sound of more pounding footsteps followed, as though some terrified soul were being chased up a stairway within. Kira shivered, and Sheila rested a comforting hand on her shoulder, but Kira could tell that Sheila was as frightened as she was.

As they continued walking people appeared out of the mist. Some halted in surprise, staring at them with terrified expressions, then ran away again. One little girl wrapped her arms around Sheila’s legs pleading to be held, to
get away from the monsters,
but when Sheila tried to lift her into her arms her hands slipped through the waif as though she were not there, and slowly the little girl faded away.

"This is insanity," gasped Sheila, staring at her empty hands.

But Kira thought there was an underlying reason to the madness. She could sense a darkly creative spirit behind it all, the guiding hand of the Mogul, a creature who could only create worlds or dreams doomed to destruction, and so-along with the fear that never seemed to leave her on Otherworld-she experienced a bone-deep sense of sadness that such a person even existed.

But the nightmare world that Dreamtime had become was not all relegated to darkness. They passed through all points of the fantasy day and night. At times it was like striding into a bubble or a wall of mist and then into another totally different horror. At other times Kira realized that many many people must be sharing the same nightmare because the vision seemed to flow away to the distant rolling horizon, and it wasn’t only people. Some of the nightmarish dreamscapes were inhabited by creatures she had never imagined, and yet somehow she knew them from the dream beasts that afflicted them. They
were
people, somehow. They just didn’t look human.

When the mountain top revealed itself again she froze, wondering if she were about to be sucked away only to land upon it and to have to face the Grigs and the giant
Empty-eyed-man
. But then slowly it faded once more, and she found herself entering another area of darkness and screams.

"This place goes on forever," she lamented, gripping Jen’s arm.

"Dreams have no beginning and no end," said the Elder. Then her jaw snapped shut, and she stared cautiously about.

Kira understood immediately why the old woman had gone silent. Suddenly the sense of being watched, of being followed was overpowering. She spun in place, her hand gripping the hilt of the knife in her belt. Jen’s dark and usually unseeing eye gleamed from within, and her shoulders tensed. Sheila backed against Kira, and they all huddled like a gaggle of geese awaiting the sneaking attack of a fox.

Slithering movement in the darkness surrounding them reminded Kira of the rustling sound she’d first heard in the forest when she suddenly appeared on the trail. She imagined a giant predatory snake with bright faceted eyes slipping around to tighten its lengthy coils about the entire group. Only in her mind this
snake
had tentacles with suckers the size of teacups and teeth inside them.

"Not all here is dreams," whispered the Elder.

"If it isn’t dreams," Kira whispered back, "what is it?"

"The Mogul has created many creatures within the borders of this realm that are more than myth and less than real, but like all the other dangers here they are still real enough to kill."

Kira recalled her mother saying that there were different levels of
real,
but how real did something have to be to kill you? What difference did it make if something wasn’t real but still could?

The Elder began to chant under her breath and to make strange warding gestures with her hands. Kira could feel the power of the spell in the air around them, like warm air on a cold night, like a comforting touch on her shoulders.

"Keep walking," said Jen, nudging her onward.

The others followed, but beneath the murmur of the Elder’s dirgelike refrain Kira could still hear the slithering sound around them.

Eventually they came to a wide flat beach where purple waves crested onto the rocky shore. Giant, alien creatures frothed the water around a boat filled with terrified, screaming men, women, and children.

"This is Hell," said Kira.

"It might as well be," agreed the Elder, "but at least those will awaken sooner or later."

Kira noticed that Sheila was unusually silent, staring right through the boat. Without warning she strode out into the water, and before Kira could reach her she disappeared beneath the waves.

Chapter 48

That they could even all maintain contact with one another amid the swirling, hallucinatory madness of the desecrated Dreamtime Sheila considered a miracle. But somehow their own reality transcended the dream reality and the four of them had been able to make their way through it, if indeed, they made their way anywhere at all. For all she could tell the Encroachment might have been like a vast treadmill, hallucinations whirring past as
they
stayed in one place. She knew that if they remained within its borders much longer, though, they would all go mad, and she also realized that everything she witnessed in the Encroachment might not necessarily be exactly the same as what her companions did.

So when Kira stopped, staring out into the ocean at the boatload of terrorized people, Sheila had seen something else-two separate and yet intertwined realities-as though each of her eyes saw something different. One vision told her there was a wide body of strangely colored water in front of her, a sea filled with murderous, monstrous beasts and a hapless crew of castaways on a foundering boat. Her other eye revealed people
beneath
that ocean. People who were within it but somehow not part of it, and she instantly understood why.

She strode out into the pounding surf not feeling the pressure of the waves, not experiencing any temperature or texture change from the air around her, and she hesitated for only a moment continue breathing when her face passed beneath the surface. She stopped amid the group she had seen at a distance, and they stared at her as though
she
were the strange sea creature among them.

"I can see you," she said, quietly, and she was answered by a collective gasp.

A large, heavyset man with eyebrows so bushy they seemed to have lives of their own frowned, turning back to the group. "She can’t, really."

"But I can, and I can hear you, too," Sheila assured him.

He started. His big brown eyes widened, and he covered his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Who are you all?" Sheila asked. "You aren’t here dreaming."

"No," said a tiny woman wearing a bright floral skirt and a cable knit pullover type garment that fell to below her waist. "We do not dream. We only attempt to ameliorate the suffering of those who do."

Sheila nodded. "You try to fix their nightmares."

"There is little we can do," said a man wearing a large cowboy hat and roll-cuffed jeans over sandals. "Our powers are so much less now without the Oculets."

"You’re dream makers," said Sheila, quietly. "Creators."

The woman nodded.

"You’re dead," said Sheila.

Another nod.

"How many of you are there?" asked Sheila.

The woman smiled, sadly. "As many as stars in the sky. Once we managed the Dreamtime with an even hand. There were nightmares here, but they were few compared to the good dreams, and they were caused by the dreamers not the Dreamtime. Now there is nothing but despair. We do everything that we can to keep that from turning to destruction, but it is like sand running through our fingers. And not being living creators... without the Oculets... our powers are greatly diminished."