Authors: S. Andrew Swann
Dragons & Dwarves (63 page)
I stepped forward and suddenly saw the wall spotted with gore, tufts of hair, shiny bits of—
I stumbled back and the vision disappeared.
“Okay, that wasn’t the light.”
I walked backward from the bed frame, toward the door. My heart raced.
The mana from the Portal used the environment around itself as an organizing principle. The patterns could be chemical, like the crystalline structure of the salt under Lake Erie; or ritual and cultural, like the New Age occultism that Nina had practiced. It could be geographic, such as in the mystical woods that had enveloped the North Chagrin Reservation; it could be architectural, like innumerable churches, or the maze the dwarves had made of the Huletts’ remains.
Patterns could also be emotional, and psychological.
Such as this house, the mind of Mazurich, and the way he had killed himself.
The door slammed shut behind me.
“Shit.” I whipped around and grabbed the knob and tried to pull it open. It was shut fast by something more powerful than the latch.
Something laughed behind me.
I turned around, back flattened against the door.
“Only the damned follow me here.”
Mazurich’s voice was little more than a whisper. He sat above the bed, hovering above the box spring where the missing mattress must have been. Blood flowed from his mouth, turning his chin and the front of his shirt a glossy black. His skull was shaped wrong, and when he moved, I could see that it was because of a massive crater in the back of his head.
Mazurich’s voice was little more than a whisper. He sat above the bed, hovering above the box spring where the missing mattress must have been. Blood flowed from his mouth, turning his chin and the front of his shirt a glossy black. His skull was shaped wrong, and when he moved, I could see that it was because of a massive crater in the back of his head.
He turned his face toward me and stared into my eyes. I couldn’t look away. I knew the face. I had interviewed him innumerable times. I also knew he was dead, and the specter before me couldn’t be him . . .
Just an image conjured up by the Portal.
“W-why did you kill yourself?” I tried to keep my composure. It wasn’t easy.
Mazurich laughed again. When he lifted his head, I could see through his mouth to the wall behind him.
“You know, Maxwell. You’ll join me in hell soon enough.”
I shook my head, no.
“You will do His bidding, even if you fight Him.”
“Who is he?”
“He has an infinity of names: the morning star, the bringer of light, the father of lies.”
“He has my daughter.”
Mazurich laughed.
“You are already lost.”
“No,” I whispered.
“You will give your soul for what He will promise you.”
I screwed my eyes shut and clenched my fists. I tried to anchor myself against the fear. “What the hell are you?”
“What you will become.”
“No,” I shook my head. “You’re the mana-animated guilt of a poor bastard that couldn’t accept the decisions he made.”
“You cannot fight Him.”
“No,” I whispered. “
You
couldn’t.”
You
couldn’t.”
A chill wind blew through the room, making my bones ache. For a moment I could actually feel my heart stop.
I opened my eyes, blinking, and the phantom was gone. No specter, no blood, and even the smell of death seemed to have receded.
The morning star,
The bringer of light,
The father of lies,
Lucifer,
The Devil.
Mazurich was a good Catholic, and if that’s really what Mazurich thought, I could understand how he might end up killing himself. I was shaken myself as I backed out of the bedroom.
What if the authors of that evangelical pamphlet had a point?
When I got back to the car, it was after eleven and I had another meeting to go to.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
T
HE Superior Viaduct has an interesting history. It was one of the first rail connections between east and west across the Cuyahoga River, and one of the first moving bridges marking it as a precursor of dozens of drawbridges that would rise, fall, and swing across the river.
HE Superior Viaduct has an interesting history. It was one of the first rail connections between east and west across the Cuyahoga River, and one of the first moving bridges marking it as a precursor of dozens of drawbridges that would rise, fall, and swing across the river.
Nineteenth century trolleys crossed an arched stone approach toward a swinging iron trestle that would carry them west. The operation lasted only a quarter century or so, surviving at least one fairly significant disaster where a trolley plunged into the river, eventually to be replaced by higher, more modern structures at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The iron trestle of the bridge was shortly sold for scrap. But the arched vault of the eastern approach has remained for close to a century, a bridge to nowhere. Like the Huletts, it is one of many odd artifacts in the city that are subject to periodic debates that swing between development, restoration, and apathy.
With the viaduct, there was a brief development debate, but since the Portal opened the pendulum had swung solidly toward apathy. However, as far as meeting places went, it was probably the most public abandoned structure you could find—a raised open-air deck cutting through the heart of the eastern shore of the Flats.
While the East Flats were a little less hard core than the West—a fetish club like the
Nazgûl
wouldn’t fit in with the restaurants and comedy clubs that clustered on this side of the river—the area was still choked solidly with people at quarter to midnight.
Nazgûl
wouldn’t fit in with the restaurants and comedy clubs that clustered on this side of the river—the area was still choked solidly with people at quarter to midnight.
It reminded me why I haven’t gone clubbing for over twenty-five years. I don’t know what was worse, the five-mile-per-hour traffic, or the twenty-something pedestrians who believed that side-walks were only a suggestion.
Fortunately, I still reached my destination ten minutes early. I parked Reggie’s Lincoln by the barriers at the eastern end of the viaduct. I stepped out of the car and was just far enough away from the chaos and noise around me to hear my feet crunch in the snow.
The night was clear and cold, the only cloud was the fog from my own breath. The deck of the viaduct arced away from me, over the Flats, to dead-end at the river. Blocking my path, on the other side of the traffic barrier, was a tall chain-link fence. It had a gate, but it was padlocked.
I stood at the gate and looked at the deck. It was covered by a layer of snow, silver and unmolested under the glow of the full moon.
It looked like I’d got here first.
I wasn’t about to break in. I could see a frightening array of wards scribed on the top rail of the fence. I didn’t know what any of them might do, but I wasn’t about to find out the hard way. I wasn’t going to help Sarah by inflicting random curses on myself.
I stood by the gate and waited for my anonymous e-mailer to show himself.
I waited.
I checked my watch five times, each time sure that I’d been stood up, or that the phantom e-mail had really meant
only
last midnight.
only
last midnight.
However, every time, my watch told me that even less time had passed. It didn’t feel possible. The ten minutes to midnight seemed to stretch to twenty. Everything seemed to crawl around me. Even the fog of my breath seemed hesitant.
By the fifth time I suspected there was something more going on than my impatience. My watch read 11:58:49, and I was convinced that I’d been standing here for way more than eight minutes.
I looked at the seconds and waited for the 49 to change to 50. And waited. In my head I counted to ten before the LCD winked over to 50. I counted fifteen to reach 51.
I looked up from my watch and realized that it wasn’t just a wayward timepiece. The noise from the Flats was wrong, octaves lower than it should be, I couldn’t pick out anything recognizable as a human voice, and everything was muffled and nearly subliminal.
Down the street where there were people, I could see movement, but barely. I looked down and kicked the snow at my feet, and saw it hang in the air for a short eternity before arcing slowly back to merge with the slush at my feet.
I looked back at my watch.
11:59:03.
I counted a full twenty seconds before the number flipped to 04.
Almost at the same time, the air around me rang with the sound of a gigantic bell. The sound was undistorted, and felt so close that I could picture myself right next to Quasimodo as he pulled the rope.
In front of me, of its own accord, the gate in the fence opened.
I looked around and all I could see of the world had stopped. The people at the end of the street showed no visible movement. By them, a glowing cigarette butt hung in midair where a leather-clad biker had thrown it toward the gutter. The Harley he rode was caught in mid-spray passing the college kids, the slush frozen in the air, halfway toward them.
There was another resonating bell sound, the gong vibrating the fillings in my back teeth.
My watch still read 11:59:03.
Something told me it was slow.
I expected it to be awkward to move, but whatever enchantment gripped me must have compensated for little things like air resistance, acceleration, and gravity. Whoever this was, he wasn’t minor league.
I passed through the gate and walked across the snow-covered deck of the Superior Viaduct as the bell tolled again. Three down, nine to go.
Whatever distorted my sense of time began operating on my sense of space as well. The world around the deck of the viaduct began to twist, the moon coming impossibly close, and the neighboring Cleveland skyline receding into the far distance. The Flats below sank into a deep abyss while the river widened to rival the lake, swallowing the western shore.
The bell tolled four. And the air, cold and razor clear until now, began to spontaneously form mist, wrapping itself around me as I walked. The air became heavy, humid, and slightly warm.
Five.
I slowed my walk, because I knew that the viaduct dead-ended before the river, and I couldn’t remember if the raw edge was fenced off or not. I didn’t want to step off the end by accident. It felt as if I had easily traversed the length of it already.
Six.
Much longer than I expected, I couldn’t trust my sense of distance anymore. If I was where I thought I was, I’d be midway across the river by now.
Seven.
I couldn’t see my feet, or much of anything other than gray mist and a fuzzy glowing orb in the gray that showed where the moon must be. I could feel that I had left the snow cover. My feet fell on naked concrete. Or stone.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore.” The mist soaked up my words without the slightest echo, almost to the point where I thought I didn’t actually hear them myself.
Eight.
The path I was on tilted upward and became uneven. I almost stumbled until I realized that I had come to a stairway. My heart was racing, my body was half convinced that any moment I would find the edge and take a fatal tumble into the river.
I had to tell myself that there were less grandiose ways to kill me off.
“Yeah, unless this is another hallucination.”
Nine.
Pushing away unpleasant thoughts of bad trips and hostile illusions, I climbed the stairs. The mist began thinning almost immediately. After a few steps, I could see the moon clearly again.
Ten.
I stepped upward, out of the mist, and saw the moon eclipsed by something I had never seen on the Cleveland skyline. A cylindrical tower bisecting the swollen moon, with a height rivaling some of the tallest buildings downtown. The stairs I climbed, still shrouded in mists, weren’t straight, but spiraled up the side of the tower, whose base seemed to have a foundation in the mists themselves.
Even though I had never actually seen it, the tower was familiar.
“Show me to my adversary.”
Eleven.
I finally stepped completely out of the mist; setting my feet on the first visible stone stair climbing up the edge of the tower. As I did, the mists themselves fell away.
I gasped.
There was no sign of the stair I had climbed to arrive here, or of any structure below the last two steps I had trod. The stair and the tower were anchored in nothing, suspended midair above the Cuyahoga River, about seven or eight hundred feet above the Superior Viaduct. The Cleveland skyline spilled out below me.
“The FAA has to love this thing.”
I climbed up another quarter turn around the side of the tower and came face-to-face with a pair of ebony doors thirty feet wide and almost fifty high. An alien script wrapped every inch of their surfaces, glowing a blackish green in the moonlight. The hairs rose on the back of my neck, and the power here was thick enough for me to smell it in the air. It was like breathing hot static and adrenaline.
Twelve.
The bells came from inside the tower, and at the stroke of twelve, the huge doors swung out in front of me. They moved slowly, which was good because I needed to step out of the way to avoid being pushed off by them. Sidestepping the opening doors gave me a good look at how massive they actually were—the things were thicker than I was, and I needed to lose weight. Four-and-a-half feet thick at the base. The doors to this place took up more cubic feet than my entire condo.
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