Zod Wallop (31 page)

He watched a wave roll toward him. He watched it slow with a rumbling sound then stop, the last outstretched fleck of foam snapping off a white, dime-sized pebble that struck Harry’s cheek with painful force and bounced across the now frozen surface of the ocean.

Harry could not move. He was lodged to the waist in the stone sea.

The Less-Than had turned and were fleeing the beach.

“You are not being reasonable,” Lord Draining said. He too was captured by the viselike grip of the ocean. He pointed the crossbow at Emily. “I could kill you.”

The Frozen Princess laughed. “Oh, death. You threaten death? Really. Look who is coming.” On the beach the sand was spinning, thrown into a thousand whirlwinds by the beating wings of Ralewings. The creatures, thousands of them, spiraled into a sudden, yawning blackness.

“No,” Lord Draining said. “You don’t mean to bring the Abyss Dweller.”

“I mean to ride him across all the lands,” Emily said.

Gabriel was reading to her son when the little girl tugged her sleeve. “Excuse me,” the girl said.

“Yes?”

“I’m Lydia.”

“Oh, yes,” Gabriel said. She recognized this girl now. She hadn’t ever warmed to this Lydia.

“I’m sorry your son is dead,” the girl said. She was dressed in a white, lacy dress.
A little too cute
, Gabriel thought. Children, even girls, should be dressed more practically. There was no denying there was dirt in the world.

“Oh, he’s not dead at all,” Gabriel said. “He often sleeps so soundly you can’t wake him.”

“He’s dead,” Lydia said.

“Well, that’s rude. I’m sure—”

“It’s rude and I’m sorry and”—here the girl suddenly shouted at the top of her lungs, her hands small fists—” he’s
dead!
”

The shout made tears jump to Gabriel’s eyes. “He is,” Gabriel said. “He is dead, I suppose.”

“We have to go,” the girl said, and she took Gabriel’s hand. “We have to go talk to my daddy.”

Gabriel allowed herself to be led from the room.

Helen Kurtis had left the room because she could not abide listening to the crazy woman read to her dead son from a book that was now a reality. It was all sad but Helen was also tired and sick of so much strangeness—strangeness was not a diet she could stomach—and when she found old Robert Furman stumbling around in the hall and muttering that he needed to speak to his niece she shook him and said, “Well, you can see she’s not here,” and brought him along. She had been disgusted and tired, and as she watched the Ralewings pour into a great black hole in the sand and saw her friends stuck like sticks in an ocean that had simply stopped, she felt her terror had been usurped by a cosmic, godlike irritation with the impossible. She sat in the sand next to where Robert Furman slumped, and sobbed bitterly.

H
ARRY
H
AD
N
EVER
drawn the Abyss Dweller either, but he had no interest in seeing what form it had taken. He
would
see it though. Another of its names was The Thing You Had To Look Upon. The last of the Ralewings had descended into the pit, which was silent and black and curiously geometrical, smooth-sided, almost a rectangle.

A woman and a girl moved around the black expanse and walked toward the ocean.

Harry felt something hot in his throat. He knew. “Amy!” he shouted.

The girl broke free of the woman’s hand and ran quickly across the sand and came running and jumping across the frozen ocean.

Harry reached to touch her as she ran to him, but she stopped before coming within his arms. “I can’t hug you,” she said.

“You are my daughter,” Harry said, “Amy.”

“No, I’m Lydia. And Amy can’t go back and you know that. Wanting her back is a poofum wish.”

A poofum wish, of course, was any impossible wish that could cause great mischief—as anyone who had ever read The Everything Wish knew.

“Amy, I love you.”

Lydia looked up at the sky. “It’s all your fault. Just because of a single bad thing, you want to hurt everything with a hurt so bad that there will be a big nothing forever and forever and forever. I hate you!”

“No, darling, I just—” He managed to grab her arm and so he dragged her to him, hugging her. “I want you safe, I want this nightmare—”

She turned and screamed in his face, spittle flying. “You can have anything you want. You are Blodkin, aren’t you? And you just want bad things.”

Harry looked up as several drops of water thudded his head. The sky was full of clouds, a storm was approaching.

“Let me go,” Lydia said.

“I just want—”

“Let her go.”

Harry turned. It was Jeanne. Jeanne was shouting at him. The rain opened up then, like that, and threw a curtain between them.

“She is our daughter!” Harry shouted.

“She is dead!” Jeanne shouted.

Harry hated her then.

The rain made the stone waves slippery and treacherous, but Gabriel came on. She knew her course and she held to it. Rain hid her advance, and she came up behind him. He was peering off in the other direction, but he turned at the last moment.

“My son is dead!” she screamed. She carried the shattered tip of a wave, a cold, deadly pyramid the size of her palm, and as Lord Draining turned, she brought it down. The first blow punched a hole in his forehead, and she hit again, smashing his vile nose, and then he was raising something—a man of cruel sinew and bone, hard as a scorpion to kill—and her jaw exploded in pain and she was gone—

Lord Draining pushed her away. He had fired the crossbow upward. Bitch. Show her. He felt weak though, woozy. Not like him to let a couple of blows tire him so. Still, there was blood everywhere. And he was blind with rain. He could see lightning dancing on the surface of the stone sea. He coughed. He shouldn’t have done that. He pitched forward.

And died. Two feet from him, Gabriel lay dead, sprawled on her back.

“Let me go!” Lydia shouted. The ocean began to move. Harry felt his legs move slightly in their stone leggings. He hugged Amy to him. He could not let her go…not again.

Emily felt the Cold One release her hand. “Wait,” Emily shouted, but her champion had turned and was wading toward the shore. Emily turned and reached for Rene. They embraced. “I sense a loss,” Emily said. “Two Believers are dead.”

Rene said nothing and Emily hugged her close and spoke in her ear, “But fear not, Sister, we have the strongest of them still, we have the Engine of it All and he will see us to our reward.”

“I have to go!” Lydia screamed. “I have to close the hole. It is my job to close the hole. You better let me do it, Daddy. You better!”

“No,” Harry said, “I have you. We must get to shore.”

The animate world was asserting itself in the Cold One’s absence. Its transformation was not perfect or complete, and pebbles savagely pummeled Harry’s shoulders as he hugged his daughter protectively and staggered toward shore. He saw Jeanne ahead of him, already being helped to shore by Helen and Robert Furman.

He had reached the shore himself when he stumbled and Lydia broke free. She was on her feet immediately and running, and Harry ran after her.

He knew what she intended to do. Wasn’t he a god? Wasn’t he Blodkin, designer of Zod Wallop? Yes, he knew what she was going to do. She was going to do her job. She was going to dive into the hole and be gone forever and ever because it would close behind her leaving nothing but a lovely, sun-licked stretch of sand for bikini-clad beauties to tan their tummies on.

Only Harry Gainesborough wasn’t going to let that happen.

He ran after her, gaining. The rain had slowed, and he could see her, see the distance she had to the hole, and he knew that he could catch her in time.

“Harry!” his wife screamed behind him. “Let her go. Can’t you see?”

See what?
he wondered. See the hopelessness, the pain, the death that had come between Jeanne—he loved her then, he loved her now—and himself, see.

“Harry,” Jeanne shouted, “if you stop her, It will come out and there will be nothing! Nothing!”

And Harry knew that that was true too—it was the sort of thing a god would know—and he knew, maker of symbols, that the Abyss Dweller was nothing but death, resignation, apathy.

So what? Maker of symbols, no symbols could save him. He could not let his daughter die.

Through the rain, he saw the hole. He was within ten feet of his daughter’s perfect shoulders. A few long strides and he would be able to snag a bare foot.

He saw the black rectangle, the Abyss Dweller’s entrance to this world, and he recognized the way it widened, and he stopped. He stopped and let his daughter run on. He stopped and turned away, not caring to watch her fly away forever.

He had seen the coffin shape and understood.

H
E
R
ACED
T
OWARD
Jeanne, standing then in the slow rain, and he caught her in his arms, this time, and this time he did not leave before the coffin lid was closed but stayed, holding his bride, his companion on the earth, the one he was born to champion despite all evils, even the senseless and terrifying death of a daughter.

Behind them Grimfast Castle shivered and melted and the sun blazed and it was the minister who came to them and, touching Harry’s arm, escorted them out of the church and into the waiting hearse.

He would have to watch the tiny coffin lowered into the ground. He had not done that before; he did not think he could bear to do such a thing. He knew now that he could.

And he knew that, tomorrow, he would continue work on
Zod Wallop
and that Jeanne might find that strange, so shattered would she be.

“Work, the day after her funeral?” she would ask.

And he would say, “It’s her book, Jeanne. It helps me.”

Jeanne would be resistant to therapy too, and perhaps she would always resist that. She was a private person.

But she would understand his seeking help.

He would seek out a group at Harwood Psychiatric Institute. He would pay whatever it cost to participate. He had money and he wasn’t above using it to put a little pressure in the proper place.

He would seek out the others. In particular, he would seek out a fan of his, a rather wide-eyed young man with a mustache named Raymond Story.

A
LLAN
G
OT
M
AD
and walked out of group, but Rene ran after him and brought him back.

“Would you like to talk about it?” the counselor asked.

Allan glared at the man.

Rene spoke. “Allan wants to know where Raymond is. Nobody around here ever tells us anything. You say we should support each other, be a goddamn family, and then Raymond’s gone and nobody says anything, like he was never here, like this is fucking Russia or something and people can just disappear.”

“Ah.” The counselor sighed, sucked on his unlit pipe. “You are right Rene, Allan. I apologize. We just hoped…well, we don’t know where they are, either.”

“They?”

“Emily Engel is gone too. We think—excuse me, Harry, but you seem to find all this very amusing.”

Harry, caught smiling, nodded his head. “I guess I do. I have been in touch with the two fugitives. In fact, they are staying with Jeanne and me.”

The counselor blinked. “Staying with you?”

“Emily and Raymond are my greatest fans, you know. A writer likes to have such fans close at hand when moments of doubt strike. In any event, I have two announcements to make, both fairly momentous, I think. Yesterday, Emily spoke to me.”

“
Spoke?
” The counselor leaned forward. “What did she say?”

“Zod Wallop.”

The counselor leaned back and frowned. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It was a request, actually, that I continue reading to her from a book I am in the process of writing. I was quite flattered, of course, that her first attempt at communication would be prompted by this desire.”

“And what does Zod Wallop mean?”

“Well, that’s not precisely the question. It doesn’t
mean
so much as
act
on the heart. It is an act of love.”

“You are not communicating clearly, Harry.”

Harry shrugged. “Perhaps. Anyway, my second announcement is perfectly straightforward, is, in fact, in the form of an invitation. I have them here.” He opened the briefcase on his lap and handed the envelopes around. Rene ripped hers open while Allan simply blinked at his. She gasped, smiled. She ran her finger over the raised type.

Mr. Robert Furman wishes
to announce the
marriage of his niece
Emily Engel
to
Mr. Raymond Story
on
…