Zod Wallop (17 page)

“Well,” Harry said, “I think Raymond is letting you off the hook, morally. He’s saying you are a sort of moral zombie, in thrall to an Evil you are powerless to resist. He’s speaking of the Gorelord here, one of the two great Vile Contenders in Zod Wallop, the other, of course, being Lord Draining.”

“Do you believe any of this?” Mitford asked.

“Well, I wrote it,” Harry said, smiling, feeling an odd sense of pride rise up in the fog.

“And when you write a thing, does that make it real?”

“No,” Harry said, frightened again.

Meaning winked out then; Mitford’s words became a series of shaped sounds, abstract noises with a vaguely interrogative quality.

Harry looked around the small room, which had suddenly grown smaller. The walls had turned to gray stone, mottled with lichen, sweating droplets of black water. The bulletin board, usually shingled with pieces of paper (inspirational poems, articles on depression, announcements of Ping-Pong tournaments and vocational rehabilitation programs)—all of it, Harry assumed, bogus, camouflage for the prison that bound them—was gone, replaced by a large, hanging pelt, the barbed hide of a Virotomus still showing the howling shadow-face of its last human repast etched in the image cells.

It was a striking trophy, and it held Harry’s attention until someone screamed.

It was Emily, twisting forward, mouth open in a howl, her wheelchair tottering sideways—a wheelchair of gold, encrusted with jewels, the wheels not wheels at all but great silver ornate discs with the entwined lizards of Mal Ganvern sinking their steel teeth into each other—and then falling in a cymbal crash, echoed and re-echoed in the Room of Screams, and Emily crawling from the ruined throne and raising her hand and clutching at something in the air.

A hand. A white, translucent hand that gripped Emily’s own hand and drew her upright. The whiteness seemed to bleed into Emily’s own flesh, racing up her arm and into her face, routing the color in her cheeks, glazing her eyes with ice. Emily shouted, a bleat of pain, her breath a shot of wintry mist.

Her feet had left the ground. She floated in the room, the wheelchair/throne on its side, a wheel spinning so that the etched lizards seemed to chase one another in a silver frenzy. For a moment, the room and its inhabitants entered Harry’s mind in a welter of image and sensation, filled with revelation, truths riding on the backs of truths.

Harry could smell the cold and the mud and the blood-smell of the black waters and the sour-milk smell of the Ralewings that dwelt in the underground river. He could smell hopelessness, like strong disinfectant in a charnel house.

Mitford, hands clasped in his lap, was wearing a black shroud, the uniform of the Gorelord’s minions, and Harry saw the tattooed stitches on the man’s lips, the symbol of obedience in those chosen to speak. Harry—granted this moment of supernatural awareness—sensed a dull hum flowing from the psychologist, and knew that a grueleach dwelt within the man, drugging him into holy service. Raymond, standing, wore a wizard’s blue robes, emblazoned with constellations of stars, moons, and Happy Faces. His hair seemed to writhe, and Harry realized that small, mischievous Ember folk cavorted there.

Rene was screaming, her hands raised, the palms red—blood, Harry thought—and she turned to run, falling over the chair, tumbling softly in the folds of her blue silk dress, screaming.

Allan caught her as she fell, lifting her, graciously, solemnly. Black flames flickered from the seams in his gleaming armor.
Anger
, Harry thought,
bone-melting anger
. Ripe with certainties, Harry knew that this was the anger of Blodkin Himself, the force that had brought everything into being and that had not always been killing Rage but had, once, been the Tremor and the Kiss and the Assault of Desire.

And Emily, her feet floating above the ground, turned slowly, the royal medallions that adorned the hem of her golden robe emitting a sparkling flurry of musical notes.

Emily, like a wind-chime angel, rotated in a slow circle, her arm wrenched toward the ceiling by the disembodied hand. As her face returned to Harry’s gaze, he saw that it was a mask of frost, her mouth a purple O.

She spoke then. Although her lips did not move, the voice was clear, feminine, filled with the easy authority of someone accustomed to being obeyed. “There are three gifts,” Emily said.

Yes, Harry thought.

“There is the gift of ease, of life unfettered. There is the gift of knowledge, which shatters the gift of ease. And there is the gift of death, Blodkin’s apology for the gift of knowledge.”

Harry saw that one of Emily’s slippers had fallen off, and that her bare white foot was descending again, the other, slippered foot, slightly raised, and he knew what would happen
for he had written it
and—no hiding now—that made it true.

The Frozen Princess floated in the air, the last incantation having sent her to the ceiling. Now the pale Lizards of the Apocalypse barked in unison, the Wire Cat screamed and spit green sparks, and the Gorelord’s wizard roared, “Descend.”

Slowly, she floated toward the spectators, all of them enraptured, some by the spectacle, some by the drugs. A young boy—for boys will be boys at the end of the world—darted close to look up the Princess’ dress and was snatched back by a vigilant aunt skilled in grabbing adolescent ears and bending them to her will.

Down she came. She was an ice dagger, descending. Her bare, frozen foot touched the stone floor and she balanced, like some cardboard cutout of a ballerina, poised and perfect, and the crowd was silent waiting for something to happen.

And, of course, something happened, because something always does.

And what happens isn’t always a good thing. In this case what happened was a noise, a sort of pop sound accompanied by a hiss. The hiss was uttered by the Gorelord himself, and was an expression of shock and dismay.

The pop was uttered by the Frozen Princess’ toe as it came into contact with the stone floor. Her icicle toe shattered, blown into a glitter of dust.
Pop, pop, pop
. The other toes went.
Pop
.

“Ahhhhh,” the spectators murmured. It was a sound that rose toward hysteria as the Princess’ legs exploded, one immediately after the other, two ear-clobbering slams. Then arms. Then, with a howl, her head. Her torso spun end over end, bouncing across the stone floor and coming to rest against the wall in a scandalous manner but remaining miraculously intact so that the same small, lewd boy, escaping his aunt, approached warily.

And then the last of the Frozen Princess blew, lifting the boy up and out a window, as though his exit had been choreographed, and creating a dark hole in the floor.

And everyone came and peered in the hole and could not see the bottom but felt dizzy and reckless, as though they might plunge into its upside-down night. Quickly, they backed away.

The Room of Screams was empty and night was upon the castle and everyone was saying that it was a shame about the Frozen Princess but that perhaps it was for the best (a common attitude toward the misfortune of others).

This was the hour when sleep is so heavy and time so slow and the night so long that the drowsing heart ponders whether it should take another beat and finally thinks,
oh, why not
?, and it’s always that close, just a shrug in the uncertain dark. It was then that something crawled out of the hole. If you had been there you would not have heard it coming. But you would have felt it. There is a part of the brain born to sense the approach of such things. This part of the brain is very old. It has always been there because it has always been acquainted with the thing that came out of the hole after the Frozen Princess went off. In the old days, this part of the brain contained a powerful, deadly poison, and, on sensing the presence of the Abyss Dweller, it flooded the body with oblivion.

If you had been there, turned away from the hole, just admiring a new rack or gouging tool, humming softly, glad that the Room of Screams wasn’t something a man (or woman) of your class had to fear…that part of your brain would have sensed it.

“Die!” it would shout, and it would discover then, sad appendix to intelligence, that this modern world had made a mistake. It was now an obsolete organ, and it had no lethal poison, no killing tricks.

You would realize, with acid panic, that you couldn’t die. You would realize you were in Big Trouble.

Harry watched Emily descend. No one else in the room moved; even the Ember people had ceased their wanton play in Raymond’s hair and were watching.

Something bad was going to happen, and it was inevitable.

Harry rose up, shouting, his whole body shaking.

He dove toward Emily and caught her in his arms and the chill that was within her entered him, like an Arctic sea, brutal and implacable. He fell backward, Emily following him to the floor.

And he saw her face, her glazed eyes, saw blood on her lips and saw, on her shoulder, the disembodied hand, resting like a glass spider. The flesh under the proprietary clasp of ice fingers was blue. Harry reached for the hand to pry it loose, and it leapt up and caught him by the throat, and his head was instantly severed, or so it seemed, perched on a marble pillar, and he could not breathe and the room flickered in gray light. He saw the room’s ceiling, its familiar acoustical tiles, and the face of Mitford floated into view, filled with concern. The psychologist was wearing a suit. His face seemed oddly naked, and Harry realized that the tattooed stitches that outlined his lips were gone.

Mitford was saying something, reaching for Harry. He was jostled from view by Raymond, who bent close to Harry and seemed to be shouting, although Harry could hear nothing. The Ember people had fled Raymond’s hair, and Raymond was wearing one of the hospital’s gray sweatshirts. He was holding a styrofoam cup, lurching forward with it, the black, steaming liquid spilling out, small pinpricks of pain splattering Harry’s cheeks.

Harry’s throat was suddenly released. His body came alive, his throat a smoldering column of pain. Sound rushed in: shouts, screams, a door slamming, glass breaking. Mitford was wrestling with Raymond. Allan clutched them both and brought them to the floor. Harry was jerked around by the pain, flopping like a fish, and he saw Emily, lying very still, her head sideways on the floor and she saw him and light bloomed in her eyes.

Her smile reassured him, and he drifted into the darkness without fear.

The brace they used to keep his head immobile during the healing sometimes seemed to contribute to the pain, as though his shoulders were in a vise. He floated in a lotus dream of drugs, and people came and went in the fogged window of his perception. He remembered Raymond standing at the foot of the bed, sobbing, saying he was sorry. And he remembered telling Raymond not to apologize. “You saved my life,” Harry whispered. Harry was certain that this was the case, although he did not try to explain what that meant, certainly not to Mitford who interpreted what had transpired in mundane terms: Emily had had an epileptic fit and Raymond, in his zeal to be of assistance, had accidentally poured a scalding cup of coffee on Harry. This did not explain Emily’s being dragged off the ground by a ghostly hand, nor did it address the matter of transformation (i.e. group therapy turning into Blackwater Castle’s Room of Screams).

One explanation for the events might, Harry knew, be hallucination, but if so, it was a communal delusion, obviously shared by Raymond, Emily, Rene, and Allan. Harry also suspected that Mitford had seen more than he would admit.

“Tell me about
Zod Wallop
,” Mitford said. He tossed a glossy copy of the book on the bedcovers.

Harry shrugged. “It’s my most successful children’s book.”

“And your last.”

“Yes.”

“Why’s that?”

“I didn’t feel like writing any more books.”

“Because your daughter died. And yet this book was written after your daughter died.” The psychologist tapped the picture book and sat down on the edge of the bed. Harry, propped up by pillows in the bed, his head gripped by an intricate orthopedic device, felt trapped.

“I want to call Helen Kurtis,” Harry said. “And I want to call my ex-wife.”

Mitford nodded. “Yes, I understand. We have had this conversation before, Harry. As soon as your condition has stabilized, you can talk to whomever you wish. You can leave here, for that matter.”

“Why can’t I leave right now? You can’t hold me prisoner,” Harry said.

Mitford assumed a hurt, rueful expression. “Of course not. I’m not your enemy, Harry. We can keep you here, however, for your own good. You might think of yourself as a man who has been exposed to a deadly virus and is being quarantined. You and your companions at Harwood Psychiatric were exposed to a drug that seems to have certain communicable properties.”

“Those are not my companions,” Harry said. “I was in Harwood Psychiatric for depression, and at that time I met Raymond Story. I had never met Emily or Rene or Allan until Raymond showed up at my doorstep.”