The Void (33 page)

“I think you're right.” Columns of black smoke came into view, rising in the distance beyond the amusement park. The little girl sat on her bike in front of the gates, grinning back at them. She giggled before climbing aboard the bicycle and disappearing into the park.

As the two women passed through the gates, Rebecca heard the click of a turnstile that was no longer there, and the hum of carnival music filtered down from the abandoned bandstand. Gravely followed Rebecca and she could almost see the lights glowing up the stretch of the abandoned arcade. They came to the carousel, dead leaves and painted, screaming horses. Rebecca stopped and watched it as it turned, the hint of the calliope in her ears.  

“Come on,” Gravely said, unnerved by the way Rebecca stood and stared at the ancient, creeping carousel. “I think the fires are just up here.”

Gravely's voice broke Rebecca from her trance. She breathed deep and the smell of burning wood stung her nostrils. There was something else there too, a scent she couldn't quite place. Something almost sweet, almost enticing. Almost. Something was off. Something important.  

The two women continued on, leaving the wooden menagerie behind. Then they came to the end of the fairgrounds, and the square opened up again into a great plaza.

“Oh my God,” Gravely whispered, the taste of bile rising in her. Rebecca said nothing. It was all she could do not to scream.

*  *  *

As Aidan's left shoulder smashed into the ground, he wished that he had just shot Cyrus when he had the chance. Now his rifle went bouncing away from him, sliding to the feet of one of the shadow creatures. Aidan was just thankful the thing either was unable to use the gun or didn't know how. It scowled at him, a guttural roar pouring forth from the blank space where its mouth should be.

It struck Aidan then. Not a change, but the absence thereof. He was alive and awake and the ship was in warp. He looked around at the demons that surrounded him, gibbering profane and unknown curses. At Cyrus, who stood glaring at him, ready to strike him down, perhaps even in the next moment.

But Aidan was not mad, at least no more so than he had been when he engaged the drive. He looked back at the oily wall behind him, as it pulsated and flowed, dividing the darkness and the light, and suddenly it made sense.

What lay behind the wall was the thing that those on the
Hypnos
had seen when they faced the warp jump with their eyes wide open. But Aidan had walked that path before, the day he decided to pass through the wall for the first time. For him, there were no more mysteries to reveal, no more veils to be sundered. He had seen the truth and it could not harm him any longer.

“Why have you come?” the thing that had been Cyrus asked.

Aidan pushed himself up into a sitting position, and as he did, he felt a shooting pain in his arm. It confirmed what he had feared when he landed and heard a cracking sound; something was broken.

“I came,” he said, looking longingly at the rifle sitting fifteen feet from him, a space that might as well have been eternal, “to stop you.”

Cyrus grinned widely and as he did, the dried blood and puss on his face cracked like the grease paint on some demon clown from Aidan's childhood nightmares.

“You came to stop us?” he said in a thousand voices, the words twisting and circling around each other, echoing in and out upon themselves. “As if any of your kind ever could.”

Aidan had told himself he would show no fear. He had promised himself that, in fact, he would feel none, either. Now, as he lay crippled, the swelling in his arm growing commensurate with the pain, he began to wonder, for the first time really, just what these things were.

“Do you know,” it asked, “how long we have waited? How long we have dwelt in darkness? Beneath night-black suns? Cursed and forgotten? Banished from the world of the light to wait for our coming redemption? Do you know?”

Aidan said nothing. He was more concerned with where Cyrus was standing than what he was saying. For his part, Cyrus did not wait for an answer.

“For unnumbered millennia, for untold ages of time and epochs of man. We, who once ruled over all things, who once walked among the stars. Condemned to foul and lonely places, to the black spaces between space, to whisper in the darkness. Only to see the glory of the morning through your imperfect eyes, escaping only clothed in your flesh. No, Aidan Connor, you never would have stopped us, not when we are so very close to our return.”

Aidan held his breath as Cyrus took a step toward him. But it was only a step. Cyrus turned and looked down at the warp console. It would have to be enough, Aidan thought.

“Now,” Cyrus thundered, “we shall leave this place of darkness and retake those worlds you and your kind infest. Your time has ended.”

It was the only second he needed. Aidan tapped his arm once, bringing up the program he had added just before he'd come aboard the
Singularity
. Cyrus turned back to Aidan, prepared to deliver the final blow, but then, somewhere beyond the shadow wall, the door to the bridge slid open.

Aidan grinned and a look of confusion spread across Cyrus's face. There was a sound of metal joints clicking into place. Before Cyrus knew what hit him, a robotic monster emerged from the middle of the shadow wall. It flew through the air, eight metal legs spread wide.

As the Charlotte dug the ends of those legs into Cyrus’s face, Aidan dove for the rifle the sat at the feet of one of the shadows. His left hand slid through it and Aidan nearly lost his focus as a crushing cold embraced him. When he jerked his hand free, he almost expected to see it frozen solid. The shadow bent down low over Aidan's face and wailed like some ancient Irish banshee.

Aidan was distracted only for a moment. He grabbed up the rifle, jamming it against his shoulder despite the pain of his broken arm, just as Cyrus ripped the mechanical spider from his face, throwing it across the room. The Charlotte landed on its back, flipping itself over and prepared for another attack. There was no need. Aidan took aim and fired. The bullet vanished into the black cavity of Cyrus's left eye. He stood for a moment longer. Then, in a final fall, Cyrus's body collapsed into a great lump.

The shadows roared, their voices forming a discordant chorus of awful howls. Aidan ignored them, pulling himself up to his knees.

Using his rifle as a cane, Aidan stood, nearly crumpling against the console as he did. He limped to the warp controls, sliding back the manual cover. He hoped they had been in warp long enough to fry the computers and cause a manual reset. The plan was simple—he would disengage the warp while at the same time triggering an overload. If he was lucky, he'd be back on the
Chronos
long before the core breached and lost containment.

Aidan realized something, though, as his hand hovered over the panel that would send the warp drive into collapse. It hit him quickly but not with the force he would have expected. Maybe because he had known the truth for a while, even if he didn't want to remember it.

Standing there, surrounded by the wailing, living embodiment of shadow, he realized that he had done this before. That he had triggered a core collapse one other time in his life, that day on the
Vespa
, when, in his own madness, he had sent his friends to their deaths. Aidan shook his head quickly from side to side to clear his mind. He would face that later, when this job was done. But before he could act, before he could end the warp jump and destroy the
Singularity
, a familiar voice met his ears.

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

*  *  *

Gravely and Rebecca stood with the fairgrounds behind them and stared up at a vision from the darkest of dreams. That they were in the ruined city of Fiddler's Green or an image of it, at least, could not be denied. But the ritual they witnessed was not of this world; its rites were never howled beneath the gibbous moon of Earth. Or so they hoped.

The shadows had come to that place and they no longer hid. They had massed in a full semi-circle around one who appeared to be their leader. Their bodies were bent and crooked and they wore black cloaks that seemed to meld with their beings. All except the one.

His cloak was red, like an abomination of something holy, the high priest of a heathen religion. He held the girl, smoky tendrils acting as hands. “Rebecca!” she shouted. Rebecca took a step forward, but Gravely grabbed her arm. Rebecca looked at her, eyes pleading. Gravely shook her head.

The demon's blood-red cloak fluttered in the breeze. It seemed to shimmer in the light of the fires that burned behind them. Great, wooden pyres that towered in the air. They burned, but were not consumed. What made them so hideous, however,  was the people. The men, women and children lashed to their beams, from the very bottom to the top where they were crowned with a wreath of a dozen people, all tied together.

They burned too, and Rebecca watched as their skin seemed to melt, to turn red and then black in the heat. The fire did not quench their pain with death, though their screams put the lie to any notion that they did not feel its heat. As Rebecca saw the image of Cyrus in one of their faces, she turned away and vomited, though nothing came from her stomach but bile.

“You have come, Rebecca,” the one in the crimson cloak said, “as we always knew you would. We have waited for you for so very long. You have known this was your destiny, and although there were those who tried to prevent it, fate cannot be deterred. How fortunate that you join us now on this auspicious day.”

“How does he know my name?” Rebecca whispered to Gravely.

“Because he knows everything about you. Somehow they know everything about us all.”

“And you, Caroline Gravely,” the beast continued, “you who are so pure of heart. How we have longed to reunite you with your ancestors, your family. To give you back what you lost. Yet you resisted us. Until now, on the day of this festival, when we shall gain our release from the bonds that have enslaved us these many, many years.

“Join us now freely. This is not a request, but you do have a choice. Join us or burn forever in the funeral pyres of your race, as those of your kind who came before you and rejected our most generous offer.”

“We know your lies!” Gravely shouted. “Our eyes are open. Those aren't the ones who resisted,” she said, pointing at the writhing figures behind, pointing at Cyrus. “They're the ones you tricked into passing through the wall.”

Though the creature's face was more like roiling fog than skin, Rebecca knew that he was smiling. The game was over and she had a feeling he didn't need them anyway.

“So be it,” he said. “Then you will die, as this one dies. No great purpose, no life beyond, no eternal rest. Only the shade.”

The tendrils of one hand move to the girl's face, pulling back her head. At the same time, the other hand transformed itself into a glowing, black blade.

“No!” Rebecca screamed, and had Gravely not held her around the waist, she would have run to the child's aid.

“She's one of them,” Gravely whispered, “she's one of them.”

But even Gravely doubted when the girl let out a high-pitched scream of terror and desperation. Cut short from a wail to a gurgling cough as the demon ran the black blade across her throat. Blood the color of his robe spewed forth, covering her blue jumper and turning her white sneakers a sickening pink. The hand released her and her body collapsed to the dirty, broken cobblestones below.

“You let him kill her,” Rebecca sobbed, “you let her die.”

“Honey, she's not real. Look.”

At that moment, the girl's body began to quiver. Her arms moved again, pushing herself up and onto her knees. She looked up at Rebecca and Gravely, blood still oozing from the wound. The image of the girl melted away, and in its place, among discarded clothes and melted flesh, stood one of the shadows.

The damned wailed anew and the scent of burning flesh surrounded the two women. Gravely didn't know where to go, but they could not stay here. The shadows advanced, steadily gaining on them, even if they looked as though they might fall at any moment.

“Let's go, Rebecca. Let's go now!”

The two women turned and ran, back into the amusement park. As they passed, it was as if some switch was flipped and power returned to circuits that had been dead for untold decades. The lights came on. The rides began to turn. It was no longer the ghost of music that they heard, but full-throated reality. The neon sign on the House of Ghouls beckoned them. The prerecorded voices of carnies begged them to try their luck just one time. Then they came to the carousel.

It no longer spun lazily, but at full gallop, the sound of the calliope blaring maniacally. Crazed horses and their wild, painted faces now thundered around the circle. Mad elephants and demon lions joined them. Up and down, up and down. Dancing and jumping. Rabid beasts, locked forever in a circle, chasing each other's tails.

Rebecca and Gravely could go no further. The shadow wall had come to the park. It climbed now, all the way to the stars that had peeked through the coming dusk. Stars set in a mad sky unlike any Gravely or Rebecca had ever seen. They turned back, seeking shelter, but they found none. The shadows surrounded them on one side. The black wall of sleep crept toward the carousel on the other.

The red-cloaked creature advanced. Rebecca stared up into his cold, vacant eyes, determined that if she were to die, she would not let him see the fear in her heart, even though she had a feeling he knew all of her thoughts. The beast held out his arm, forming the same gleaming obsidian blade as before. He raised it in the air, prepared to make the killing blow. Gravely took Rebecca's hand and squeezed it. A scream split the silence.

*  *  *

Aidan knew the voice. He would have recognized it anywhere. Perhaps if it had been any other he would have simply ignored it, cutting the warp, overriding the engine and running. Instead, he turned. The shadow wall was gone as were the wraiths that had lurked there only seconds before. There was only one other staring down its nose at Aidan. He would have been disconcerted if he were experiencing for the first time that feeling of looking into a mirror. After so many visits, he was almost used to it.