The Wheel of Darkness (42 page)

“The crazy bitch is putting the deck underwater!” Halsey cried, his feet slipping out from under him.

The vibration increased to a roar as the port side of the liner pressed down into the ocean, the lower main deck pushing below the waterline. The seas mounted, battering the superstructure, rising to the lowest port staterooms and balconies. Faintly, LeSeur could hear sounds of popping glass, the rumble of water rushing into the passenger decks, the dull noises of things crashing and tumbling about. He could only imagine the terror and chaos among the passengers as they and the contents of their staterooms and everything else on the ship tumbled to port.

The entire bridge shook with the violent strain on the engines, the windows rattling, the very frame of the ship groaning in protest. Beyond the forecastle the
Grenfell
loomed, rapidly approaching; she continued yawing heavily to port, but LeSeur could see that it was too late. The
Britannia
, with its astonishing maneuverability, had turned quartering to her, and the patrol ship was going to strike them amidships—2,500 tons meeting 165,000 tons at a combined speed of forty-five miles per hour. She would cut the
Britannia
diagonally like a pike through a marlin.

He began to pray.

E
MILY
D
AHLBERG PAUSED IN THE CORRIDOR LEADING FROM THE
port lifeboat deck, catching her breath. Behind her, she could hear the cries and screams of the mob—for a mob it was, and of the most primitive, homicidal kind—mingling with the roar of wind and water through the open hatches. Many other people had had the idea to head for the lifeboat stations, and a steady stream of passengers raced past her in a panic, heedless of her presence.

Dahlberg had seen enough to know that any attempt to use the lifeboats at this speed was sheer suicide. She’d seen it for herself. Now she had been tasked with getting this critical information to the auxiliary bridge. Gavin Bruce and Niles Welch had sacrificed their lives—along with another boat full of passengers—in getting that information, and she was determined to convey it.

She began moving again, trying to orient herself, when a burly man came barreling along the corridor, red-faced and goggle-eyed, crying out, “To the lifeboats!” She tried to dodge but wasn’t fast enough; he clipped her and sent her sprawling to the carpet. By the time she had risen to her feet again, he had vanished from sight.

She leaned against the wall, recovering her breath, keeping back from the stream of panicked people heading for the lifeboat deck. It shocked her how people were prone to the most grotesque displays of selfishness—even, or perhaps especially, the privileged. She hadn’t seen the crew and staff carrying on, shrieking and yelping and running around. She couldn’t help but think of the contrast with the dignified and self-restrained end of the passengers on the
Titanic
. The world had certainly changed.

When she felt herself again, she continued down the corridor, keeping close to the wall. The auxiliary bridge was at the forward end of the ship, directly below the main bridge—Deck 13 or 14, she recalled. She was currently on Half Deck 7—and that meant she had to ascend.

She continued along the corridor, past deserted cafés and shops, following the signs for the Grand Atrium—from which, she knew, she could better orient herself. Within minutes she had passed through an archway and reached a semicircular railing overlooking the vast hexagonal space. Even at this most extreme of times, she could not help but marvel at it: eight levels high, with glass elevators running up two sides, graced with innumerable little balconies and parapets draped with passionflowers.

Grasping the railing, she looked out and down into the Atrium. The sight was shocking. The King’s Arms—the elegant restaurant five levels below—was almost unrecognizable. Cutlery, half-eaten food, trampled flowers, and broken glass were strewn across the floor. Overturned tables, spilling their contents, were scattered everywhere. It looked, she thought, as if a tornado had come through. People were everywhere—some running across the Atrium, others circling aimlessly, still others helping themselves to bottles of wine and liquor. Cries and shouts filtered up toward her.

The glass elevators were still operating, and she headed toward the nearest. But even as she did so, a loud rumble filled the vast space: a growl from deep within the bowels of the ship itself.

And then the Atrium began to tilt.

At first, she assumed it was her imagination. But no: looking up at the great chandelier, she saw it was slanting to one side. As the deep growl grew in intensity, the chandelier began to vibrate, tinkling and jangling crazily. Dahlberg quickly backed into the protection of an archway as pieces of cut crystal began raining down, bouncing like hail among the tables, chairs, and railings.

My God
, she thought.
What’s happening
?

The heeling grew more acute and she gripped the brass railing fixed to a pillar at one side of the archway. With a scraping noise, chairs and tables in the restaurant below started sliding to one side, slowly at first, then gathering speed. Moments later, she heard the crashing and breaking of glass as the wall of bottles on the elegant bar at one side of the restaurant came down.

She clung to the railing, unable to take her eyes from the carnage occurring below. Now the great Steinway concert grand in the center of the Atrium began to move, sliding on its casters until it careened headlong into the huge statue of Britannia, which shivered into pieces and fell in a ruin of broken marble.

It was as if the ship were caught in the viselike grip of a giant and, despite the groaning, protesting engines, was being forced onto its side. Dahlberg gripped the railing as the slant grew worse and all manner of things—chairs, vases, tables, linens, glassware, cameras, shoes, purses—came tumbling past her from the balconies above to land in the Atrium with staccato thuds and crashes. Over the din of cries and yells she heard a particularly sharp scream from above; a moment later, a short, thickset woman with frizzy blonde hair and wearing a supervisor’s uniform came hurtling past from an upper balcony, still screaming, and careened into the piano below with a horrifying crash, the ivory keys scattering, the strings popping in a bizarre symphony of high- and low-pitched twangs.

With a squeal of metal, the elevator nearest to her shuddered in its vertical housing, and then—with a popping of glass that ripped through the entire Atrium—the entire tube shattered all at once and began to fall in slow motion like a glittering glass curtain. The wreck of the elevator—now nothing more than a steel frame—was jarred out of its channel and swung loose on its steel cable. She could see two people aboard, clinging to brass bars inside the elevator cage and screaming. As she watched in horror, the elevator frame swung crazily across the vast interior of the Atrium, spinning as it went, then slammed into a row of balconies on the far side. The people inside were thrown into the air, tumbling down, down, to at last be lost in the chaotic jumble of furniture and fixtures now jammed up against the lower wall of the King’s Arms.

Dahlberg gripped the brass rail with all her strength as the floor continued to dip. A new sound suddenly erupted from below, loud as a massive waterfall, accompanied by a rush of cold salty air so strong it nearly blew her off her perch; then white water poured into the lowest level of the Atrium and began boiling up, a vicious surge churning with pulverized furniture, fixtures, and broken bodies. At the same time the huge chandelier above her head finally ripped lose with crack of iron and plaster; the huge glittering mass fell at an angle, crashed into the parapet just opposite her, then cartwheeled down the side of the Atrium, throwing off great masses of glittering crystal like pulverized ice.

The cold, dead smell of the sea filled her nostrils. Slowly—as if from far away—she began to realize that, despite the awful destruction taking place all around her, the ship didn’t appear to be sinking; at least not yet. Instead, it was heeling over and shipping water. The engines continued to roar, the ship continued to surge forward.

Dahlberg collected her thoughts, tried to drown out the sounds of crashing glass, roaring water, and screaming. Much as she wanted to, there was nothing she could do to help anybody here. What she could do,
had
to do, was inform the bridge that the lifeboats were not an option as long as the ship was moving. She looked around and spied a nearby stairwell. Carefully gripping the rail, she half crawled, half clung her way along it until she reached the stairwell, canted at a crazy angle. Gripping the banister with all her might, she began hauling herself upward, one step at a time, heading for the auxiliary bridge.

S
PECIAL
A
GENT
P
ENDERGAST STARED AT THE BIZARRE THING OF MIST
and darkness that enveloped him. Simultaneously, he felt the cabin shudder and lean; a deep and powerful vibration hammered up from below. Something violent was happening to the ship. He fell backward, tumbled over an armchair, and slammed into a bookcase. As the ship tilted farther he could hear a sonorous fugue of destruction and despair sounding throughout it: screams and cries, crashing, breaking, the deep thrum of water along the hull. Books came tumbling down around him as the cabin rolled to a desperate angle.

He struck it all from his mind, focusing on the thing—the most bizarre thing. Within the animate smoke, an apparition was faintly visible: rolling red eyes, fanged smile, clawed hands outstretched as it enveloped him, its expression that of need and intense hunger.

Several things flitted almost instantaneously through his mind. He knew what this was, and he knew who had created it, and why. He knew he now faced a fight, not only for his life, but for his very soul. He braced himself mentally as the thing caught him in a clammy embrace, overwhelming his senses with the cloying odor of a damp, rotting cellar, of slippery insects and sagging corpses.

Pendergast abruptly felt calm wash over him—the indifferent, liberating calm he had so recently discovered. He had been taken by surprise; he had little time to prepare; but he could tap into the extraordinary mental powers the Agozyen had set free within his mind and, in so doing, emerge victorious. This contest would be a test for those powers, a baptism by fire.

The thing was trying to enter his mind, probing with damp tendrils of will, of pure desire. He let his mind go blank. He would give it no purchase, nothing to fasten on to. With breathtaking speed, he brought his mind first to the state of
th’an shin gha
, the Doorstep to Perfect Emptiness, and then
stong pa nyid
—the State of Pure Emptiness. The thing would enter and find the room empty. No—there would not even be a room for it to enter.

Vaguely, he was aware of the entity searching the emptiness, drifting, malevolent, eyes like glowing cigarette tips. It thrashed about, seeking an anchor, like a cat sinking in a bottomless ocean. It was already defeated.

It ceased thrashing—and suddenly, like lightning, it wrapped its greasy tendrils around him, sinking fangs directly into Pendergast’s mind.

A jolt of terrible pain seared through him. He responded immediately with the opposite tack. He would fight fire with fire, create an impassible mental barrier. He’d wall himself off with pure intellectual noise, deafening and impenetrable.

In the dark void, he summoned a hundred of the world’s most important philosophers and set them all to conversation: Parmenides and Descartes, Heraclitus and Kant, Socrates and Nietzsche. At once, dozens upon dozens of arguments sprouted—of nature and consciousness, freedom and pure reason, truth and the divinity of numbers—forming a storm of intellectual noise stretching from horizon to horizon. Scarcely breathing, Pendergast maintained the construct through sheer force of will.

A ripple coursed through the susurrus of dialogues, like a drop of water on the surface of a black pond. As it spread outward, the nearest conversations of the philosophers fell silent. A silent hole formed in the center, like the eye of a storm. Implacably, the smoke ghost drifted through the hole, coming closer.

Instantly, Pendergast dissolved the innumerable debates, drove the men and women from his mind. With great effort, he purged himself of conscious thought once again. If such a purely rational approach would not work, perhaps a more abstract one would.

Quickly, he arrayed in his mind the thousand greatest paintings of the Western tradition. One after another, in chronological order, he allowed them to fill up to the edges the entire frame of his consciousness; he willed their colors, brushstrokes, symbols, hidden meanings, allegories subtle and obvious, to flood his entire consciousness. Duccio’s
Maestà;
Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus;
Masaccio’s
Trinity;
Fabriano’s
Adoration
; Van Eyck’s
Betrothal of Arnolfini
burst again and again upon his mental landscape, drowning all thought with their complexity, their ravishing beauty. He continued through them, faster and faster, until he approached the present, Rousseau and Kandinsky and Marin. Then he went back and started over from the beginning, moving still faster now, until all was a blur of color and shape, each image simultaneously held in his mind in overwhelming complexity, allowing the demon no foothold . . .

The blur of colors wavered, began to melt. The low rough form of the tulpa shouldered its way through the kaleidoscope of images, a sink of darkness, sucking everything in as it grew ever nearer in his mind.

Pendergast watched it approach, frozen like a mouse under the gaze of a cobra. With a huge effort, he tore his thoughts free. He was aware of his heart beating much faster now. He could sense the thing’s ardent appetite for his essence, his
soul
. Desire radiated out from the smoke ghost like heat. This awareness sent a prickle of panic through him, little poppings and blisterings at the edges of his consciousness.

It was so much stronger than he had ever imagined. Clearly, anyone without the unique mental armor he now enjoyed would have succumbed to the tulpa immediately, without struggle.