The Stress of Her Regard (23 page)

Byron might not have heard the shot. "I don't need to know how she died," he said now in a choking voice. "
I
killed her. I seduced her, God damn me! That's what I tried to tell you, that day I picked you up in my carriage. Incest—it wasn't
her
fault, she was never strong-willed, and she did resist me at first. And then I left her alone in England with our child . . . and my horrible ex-wife."

Byron frowned and clenched his jaw, and Crawford knew he was resisting the despair the mountain's psychic field was inducing. "My ex-wife drove Augusta to this, I'm certain—I
won't
take
every
bit of blame here, God damn it!—Augusta was so like me, and that harridan I married didn't have
me
around to torment any longer."

The phantom was only a few yards away now, and it was definitely Julia. She was looking directly at Crawford, and her face suddenly curdled into an expression of almost imbecilic hatred. He flinched back and raised his hand, his sleeve rippling so rapidly that it was momentarily a smoky blur; he would have dived back the way they'd come and scrambled or tumbled back down to the valley where Hobhouse and the servants waited, but Byron caught his arm.

The phantom was fading away to complete transparency even as he watched . . . even as the light got redder and the air got thicker. It now required real muscular effort to breathe. And then she was gone.

But she had only made way for something else—the thick air was humming with the
imminence
of something else. Crawford tried to scramble back to the place where they'd come up to the summit, but the air was too thick now to push through—it seemed to squeeze his ribs, compressed by the bulk of some approaching thing.

Something was forming, but not on this mountaintop—something immensely bigger and farther away, looming down and across the miles—from the peak of the Jungfrau.

It was made of arcs of darkness that gathered out of the dimming sky, and though it never did attain anything much like
form
, something in his blood or his spine or the oldest lobe of his brain recognized it as feminine and leonine, and as it leaned down over the three people on the Wengern summit, eclipsing the whole sky, its malevolence was as palpable as the cold.

Tears sprang from Crawford's eyes and hung in the air like gelatinous gnats.

The thing in the sky spoke, shivering the crystal air with a voice like rock strata shifting.
"Answer my riddle or die,"
it said. After a long pause it spoke again.
"What is it that walked with four limbs when the sunlight had not yet changed, and now is supported by two, but will, when the sunlight is changed again and the light is gone, be supported by three?"

Crawford exhaled, and the spent breath was a bulk in front of, him, pushing his head back against the resisting air.

"Four, two and three," Byron managed to say: "It's . . . the riddle . . . of the . . . sphinx." Even in this dimming red light Crawford could see that Byron's face was hollowed and pale. "We're facing . . . the sphinx."

Crawford forced himself to look up at the thing. She seemed to be a lens, warping the magnetic lines into her shape; she was less substantial now than she had been in the days when she had caused the seven great gates of Thebes to be closed in fear of her, and been portrayed in towering stone on the plain of Gizeh, but she had clearly lost none of her power, at least in these high regions.

Crawford fought the induced self-loathing and made himself remember the legend; Oedipus had been confronted by the sphinx, and she had asked him what creature walked on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening. According to the story, the answer had been "man," who crawls in infancy, walks on two legs in maturity, and walks with a stick in old age. He opened his mouth to force the word into the air, but then he hesitated.

Why was the thing asking? And had Greek mythology preserved the answer correctly? Why would the sphinx want him to say
man
? And, as a matter of fact,
man
didn't seem to
be
the correct answer to this version of the riddle—there was nothing about infancy that he could think of that corresponded to "when the sunlight had not yet changed." Whenever that might have been, he didn't think humans would even have been around.

Who had been? The nephelim? And was the sphinx one of that species? Was he supposed to say
you
, instead of, in effect,
me
?

He remembered the flash of primordial memory he'd had when he first saw the streaks in the sky—something about the
other
sentient race on earth. Could this riddle be the equivalent of a diplomatic demand of recognition, in which case the answer would be, "Both of us"?

Byron opened his mouth to answer it himself, but Crawford waved at him urgently, forcing his hand through the thick air, and Byron noticed and remained silent.

"Remember the . . . consequences . . . of a wrong guess," Crawford told him. "And I don't think . . . mythology recorded . . . the right answer."

The thing was leaning down closer to them, and Crawford was looking up into the darkness of her gigantic eyes. They were as inorganic as frost crystals, and it was wildly disorienting to recognize intelligence—albeit a profoundly alien intelligence—behind them.

He saw that her mouth was opening, and then the whole summit of the mountain seemed to tilt toward that vast, black maw.

He went with his last guess. "Sentient life on earth," he called, forcing the words out.

Something changed then.

The menacing shape still loomed above them, but after a moment Crawford realized that the sphinx was gone—what had been the arch of her wings was now a pattern of cloud on one side and the shadowed flank of the Jungfrau on the other, and the face, which had given such a strong impression of femininity, was just a pattern of stars in the dark sky. The sphinx had receded back to the remoteness of the Jungfrau's peak.

And the air was finally beginning, to loosen—apparently he had given the right answer.

Josephine saw that her shot had somehow missed Crawford—had he actually leaped out of the way?—and she slumped limply, releasing the pistol. Several seconds later her knees and the pistol bumped against the snow-dusted stone.

She remembered the procedure her night-visiting friend had told her about, the alternative to shooting Crawford; she had been confident that the pistol would make it unnecessary, and in any case she wasn't sure how well it would work in this strange, red-lit, slowed-down world—clearly her guide had never intended for her to be here—but she now had nothing else.

At least she had no self-regard to impede her.

Though her voice clogged with tears, she managed to begin pronouncing the syllables he had taught her, and the air boiled away from in front of her as if the words were a violation of the very space here—again it occurred to her that she was not using this procedure as her friend had intended.

And, as she was speaking, she pulled the goggles off her head and swung them as hard as she could against the stone. One lens broke, and she caught one of the slow-flying fragments of tinted glass, wrestled it to a stop, and then hesitantly forced it up through the air to her face.

It took every bit of her courage and resolve to do it, but her recitation of the litany didn't even falter when she punctured her own left eye with the piece of glass.

Crawford turned now toward the person who had shot at him—and his heart sank, for he recognized her, and he wondered if he might one day have to kill her. Then he noticed the dark streak down one side of her face, and he realized that she was bleeding.

Good, he thought exhaustedly. I hope the gun blew up in her hand, I hope she's dying.

She seemed to be pulling something out of her eye. Whatever it was, she now pressed it against the stone, and he heard her sob:
"There, damn you—render yourselves visible to such as this."

Big drops were forming on the stone now, and bulging up, as if the summit were a wet ceiling viewed upside down. Angularities began to form inside the bulges, and then Crawford was able to make out orbs with hollows like eye sockets in them.

Byron tried to walk through the slowed air, then cursed and simply began swimming; it was an awkward way to travel, and at first he propelled himself backward as often as forward, but after a few moments he had frog-kicked over to where Crawford stood.

"Who is that?" Byron demanded, treading air beside Crawford's shoulder. "And what the hell are those things growing up around her?"

The bulges were breaking open, releasing waving stick-arms and grimacing heads that glistened nastily in the red light . . . but they were all grown together, so that they formed a hideous centipedelike monstrosity instead of separate figures, and half of them seemed to be partially imbedded in the rock.

"Who cares?" said Crawford, lifting his legs and spreading his arms so that he could swim too. "Let's get back down." He began struggling through the air toward the route they had climbed up.

After a few hard-won yards he looked back at Byron. "This slowed-time effect probably ends at the brink—don't go sailing over the edge."

"Him,"
yelled Josephine, beyond Byron. "You're supposed to go after
him
!"

Crawford focussed on her. She was trying to run through the resistant air, but she wound up simply flailing in place, several inches off the ground, and then the melted-together things had seized her and seemed to be clumsily trying to force her down against the stone—to make her into one of themselves? Were they the decrepit ghosts of people who had died up here?

May they enjoy her company, he thought grimly, turning away.

Then, horribly, the things began to speak, and he had to turn back again.
"Thought you could abandon your mother, did you, slut?"
chittered one of the peeled-looking heads, its voice disorientingly out of synchronization with the motions of its mouth, as several birdy hands fumbled at Josephine's face.
"After killing me! What mother wouldn't hate a daughter who killed her even as she was trying to give the daughter life?"

"I had to marry that horrible little nonentity,"
squealed another head,
"it was the only way I could get away from you! And then he killed me in that inn! Thus your fault—you killed your own sister!"

Several hinged limbs had wetly wrapped around her ankles, and a nearby head added its yapping voice to the babble. 
"I was always hidden away in your head so that you could be
Julia,
or a
machine,
and I've rotted in there! You starved me, your own self, and I hate you for it!"

Josephine fell to her knees under the ungainly assault, and she rocked her head back and wailed hopelessly into the barred red sky . . . and just for a moment she reminded Crawford of—of whom, not Julia—of his brother, who had been pulled under the waves in the savage surf off Rame Head.

With a convulsive jackknife motion that tore his shirt against the unyielding air and punched the breath out of him, Crawford turned around and began dragging himself back through the air toward her.

In the wind there is a voice
Shall forbid thee to rejoice;
And to thee shall Night deny
All the quiet of her sky;
And the day shall have a sun,
Which shall make thee wish it done.

—Lord Byron,
Manfred

The headwind deafened him and peeled his lips back from his teeth at every forward thrust—he was glad of the goggles over his eyes—but between strokes the air was as still as stagnant water, and over his own tortured breathing he could hear a couple of the heads begin to pay attention to him.
"Drinking in a pub while I was screwing another man, and drinking there still while I burned to death!"
one head called to him.

Another opened its mouth just as he clawed his way forward into the wind again, and he wondered who it would claim to be. His brother? Julia again, but tailored for
his
despair this time?

When the wind of his forward motion abruptly stopped, he stretched his arm out ahead and managed to grab Josephine's wrist; then he spread his legs wide to help moor himself to the air, and pulled until his lungs felt as if wires were being twisted in them, but nothing happened. Various ghostly limbs had grown together into a sort of ectoplasmic rope below him, and a head sprouting from a thigh was winking furiously at him.
"You still owe me my death,"
the thing hissed. 
"I got your passport, and you promised!"

Crawford pulled again, and though the effort wrenched a sob out of him he heard several ghost-limbs snap. "Kick!" he gasped to Josephine.

Josephine looked up at him, and he saw a glint of recognition in her one good eye; and then she began kicking wildly at the jabbering heads, sending jawbones and fingers slowly arching away through the red light. She kept kicking the things even after she was free, and Crawford had to yank at her arm again several times to get her attention.

"Come on, goddamn you," he told her. "Swim!"

But her goggles were gone, leaving her completely blind except when holding still, so he had to drag her through the air. They were losing their buoyancy, and several times Crawford had to kick off from the ground as they floundered over to where Byron stood. Her empty eye socket left a trail of little globes of blood in their wake, all of them settling toward the ground as quickly as drops of vinegar through oil.

The air was loosening, and the sky was brightening back through orange toward the remembered blue, and when Crawford saw the translucent figure of Julia forming again, ahead of them, it occurred to him that he should have expected this. This phantom and the sphinx evidently each existed at specific intensities of the time-slowing they'd been experiencing—each of the apparitions only became visible or invisible as a viewer approached or receded from its characteristic point on the time spectrum.