Текст книги "Well of Souls"

Автор книги: Ilsa J. Bick

Соавторы: Ilsa J. Bick
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

Chapter 29

Nothing: nothing in his mind, on the planet, or under the rock. There was simply nothing because there was nothing to find.

Try again.Clad in his environmental suit, the sound of his breaths loud in his ears, Ven Kaldarren stood so still that he imagined anyone spying him would’ve thought he’d turn into a pillar of the same hard stone that formed the mountains, the land itself. Failure is not an option. Try again.

Yet he was going to fail. He felt it. Only a day left, and he knew. He would never find the portal. Perhaps he wasn’t strong enough, or his psionic signature wasn’t a match. Maybe whoever had built this fabled portal had such an individual mindprint that, like a fingerprint or DNA, there was no way for anyone else to detect, much less access, the device. Not terrifically useful then, but Chen-Mai’s anonymous employer didn’t seem to care about that.

Try again.

He could lie. He could say he’d picked up something faint, but they’d have to wait awhile, come back. Then, before that time came, he could take Jase and go someplace far away. Not back to Betazed: That was the first place Chen-Mai would look. But Kaldarren could take Jase to Earth, leave him with the boy’s grandparents. A good thing Chen-Mai didn’t know who Jase’s mother was, so he’d have no way to trace the boy. As for Kaldarren, he could watch out for himself, something that was easier to do if he didn’t have to worry about Jase.

And he had a lot to worry about because he’d tried to scan Chen-Mai. Doing so broke every vow he’d ever made not to misuse his gift. But this was his life they were talking about now; this was his son’s life. So he’d scanned Chen-Mai—and run into a brick wall. A mind block: Kaldarren had run the fingers of his thoughts over the wall, touching it here and there, and in a way that reminded him a little of what snakes did, flicking out their tongues, tasting the air. Then he’d tried probing Mar—same wall. Same feelto the wall. And then Kaldarren was certain. The men were taking a neural blocking agent, probably an anti-scopolaminergic compound. The drug wouldn’t inhibit their conscious cognitive processes but would render them telepathically opaque. Metaphorically speaking, he might as well have tried seeing into a room through a frosted window. Kaldarren could catch shapes now and then, vague outlines of thoughts but nothing definite.

So. The blocks and the fact that both men were taking a drug so he, Kaldarren, couldn’t crack through telepathically were proof enough. Kaldarren got a certain grim satisfaction out of the knowledge that you didn’t need to be a mind reader to know that a man fearful of you seeing inside definitelyhad something to hide. That both Mar andChen-Mai were taking the drug told Kaldarren that both men knew the same thing, and neither could be trusted. They were going to kill him. They were going to kill Jase.

He couldn’t let that happen. Can’t fail, Ican’t. He thought about stealing the shuttle, or contacting Garrett. Neither was an option. There was no transmitter on the planet strong enough to pierce the interference from both the brown star’s stellar wind and the neutron star’s magnetic fields; and Chen-Mai had the shuttle in lockdown mode. Only Chen-Mai and Mar knew the code, and it was stupid of him not to have plucked the code from their minds while he had the chance.

Enough.Closing his eyes against the dead and rock-strewn landscape, Ven Kaldarren focused on the sound of his breathing. An old trick, one used early on in the meditation techniques that all Betazoid telepaths undertook as part of their early training.

Unbidden, thoughts– Jase—crept into his mind. Kaldarren frowned. Couldn’t think about his son now. Have to concentrate.Kaldarren threw his mind out in a wide net, his thoughts like a sensitive web, ready to vibrate with the tiniest psionic disturbance.

Jase.Again. Why? Kaldarren was on the verge of dragging his mind away but didn’t. If his mind kept veering to Jase, there was a good reason. Kaldarren willed the tension to leave his limbs; he opened his mind wide.

Jase.His son had seemed different in the past few days—happier, certainly, and as if he looked forward to every new day. There was Jase’s ability to gray his mind; that was new, and a revelation Kaldarren hadn’t spent much time deciphering, or dwelling upon. He reasoned that the action was a reflex, something the boy learned as a consequence of having to live with telepaths. Come to think of it, Kaldarren didn’t have much experience with living in close quarters with non-telepaths. There was Rachel, of course. His mind caressed this Rachelthought: an image of Rachel’s auburn hair fanning upon a carpet of emerald-colored grass; a burst of sunlight, and the smell of cool water from Lake Cataria. Rachel’s skin. Rachel’s lips.

His heart filled with grief. They’d lost so much. Until the last two rancorous years, when the marriage was dissolving, her mind had always been open. At the height of their love, Kaldarren felt as if they shared the same mind, the same feel….

Suddenly, a bolt of searing pain ripped through his brain. Kaldarren couldn’t help it; he screamed. His vision dimmed, and his knees buckled. He felt the sharp bite of rock as he sagged to the ground, hands clutched at either side of his helmet. The pain came again: sharp, knifing his brain as if someone had taken an axe and driven it through his mind, cleaving it in two.

Stop.Moaning, Kaldarren tried to put up a shield, keep the intruder-thought at bay. He had to get it to stop, stop!Who could be doing this, who had this much power…?

Then, through a haze of agony, Kaldarren saw an image: a shape. Indistinct, shadowy. Not humanoid. A dragon. No, not a dragon—Kaldarren tried clamping down on the pain shivering through his mind, along his limbs—not a dragon, a woman with a dragon’s… no,a serpent’s body, and wings, and eyes, those eyes….

Dad! Dad, help!Help us!

“Jase,” Kaldarren hissed, his mind spiraling toward blackness. “Jase!”

“What is it?” asked Jase. He passed his tricorder over the wall before them. The wall wasn’t rock; he stared at his tricorder’s readings then passed the device over the wall once more for good measure.

“It’s metal,” said Pahl, confirming Jase’s readings. He, too, had a tricorder. “A bunch of metal. Titanium and some other stuff, I don’t know what, I haven’t gotten that far yet in school.”

“Metal?” Jase echoed. “In a rock tunnel? And what about this?” He shoved his tricorder before his friend’s faceplate. “A magnetic lock?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

Disgusted, Jase shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.” Looking around, he searched for a place to sit and found none. He settled for squatting, cross-legged, on the rock floor. He was tired and hungry, and now they’d run into a metal wall sealed with a magnetic lock, of all things. They’d been walking for hours, and he was sweating, not from exertion this time but anxiety.

His eyes roamed the tunnel shaft behind. He picked out the faintly phosphorescent glow of flare markers, winding round like a string of fireflies, that they’d left wedged in rock clefts along the way just in case their tricorders quit. Other than their flare markers, the tunnel was pitch black. A kilometer back they’d left a pack of supplies: spare air, more flare markers. Plus they carried tiny packs of spare air on their backs, for emergencies. He hoped he wouldn’t need to use his.

Discouraged, Jase swung his head back toward the metal panel. The panel made no sense. A magnetic lock, one that was still active, on a dead planet made even less. Unless it had been left over from the time when there were people here. If true, where was the power coming from? There had to be a power source somewhere, one to power the lock and to generate the field they’d found at the tunnel mouth. But their tricorders had registered nothing, given not the slightest hint as to where this power source must be. Had to be. The only answer was that the source was shielded, or that they just didn’t know what or how to look. They were just kids, after all, and neither of them were exactly in love with science.

He ought to tell Pahl to forget this whole adventure and go back. Jase was in over his head, and he knew it. Yet he felt a strange compulsion to keep going. Even as he fought the urge to go deeper and deeper, as if an invisible tether were reeling him in, Jase felt his apprehension grow. Small comfort he’d been right about the general design of the tunnel, its similarity to tombs he’d seen in Egypt. The tunnel was carved out of the mountain rock and was tall enough for a man to pass through without stooping. Unlike tombs on Earth, however, these had no drawings on the walls, nor were the walls plastered. Instead of running straight down—under the dead lake, if their tricorders were accurate—the tunnel twisted and turned and doubled back several times in underground switchbacks, almost like a maze. Maybe now, with the metal door and the magnetic lock, this was probably just an old mine shift, and not a tomb at all. How dumb. Jase was disgusted. They’d been like little kids, thinking they were going on some great adventure when, instead, this was a mystery better left for adults who knew what they were doing, not a couple of kids armed only with dinky tricorders—not even really fancy ones—air, and flashlights.

Jase pushed against his thighs and clambered to his feet. His calves cramped, protested the unaccustomed exercise. “We should go back, tell my dad, and let him decide what to do.”

But Pahl was shaking his head. “I think I can get us through this. There’s a magnetic field here all right, just like at the entrance. But the field has a periodicity, like a pulsar.”

“So?”

“So,”said Pahl, fiddling with his tricorder, “that far in school I did get. Maybe if I match the ambient resonance frequency of the magnetic field but reverseit, I can open this.”

“And then what? How do we know you can get us back out? We don’t even know what’s on the other side. Could just be another tunnel that’ll go on for kilometers.”

“Or it might not,” said Pahl, turning his head until his ice-blue eyes and pale brown face stared down at Jase. “You and I both know there’s something here, something that wants to be found. Why else put up a wall? Why lock other people out?”

He knew Pahl was right. The setup was too elaborate: the magnetic distortion field topside, the panel and its lock. “The lock could be to keep whatever it is inside.”

“Maybe,” said Pahl, turning aside and staring at the readings on his tricorder.

Jase watched in silence as Pahl’s tricorder searched for a match, found it, and then began to emit a reverse polarity pulse. The tricorder pulsed red…red…red…green.

“Jase,” Pahl began.

The metal panel slid to one side. There was no sound, though Jase imagined that there must be the whine of some mechanism scrolling the panel to one side. But Jase heard Pahl gasp and, instinctively, both boys took a step back. On cue, they glanced at one another and exhaled a peal of embarrassed laughter.

Jase shone his torch into the blackness. Almost immediately, he felt a twist of disappointment. The panel opened into a tiny, arched room that reminded Jase of the well chamber he’d been expecting. Only the walls curved and there was no shaft to catch water. The floor was smooth and level with that of the tunnel in which they stood. Opposite the panel was another door.

“Same metal,” said Pahl, consulting his tricorder. “But there’s no magnetic field.”

“So it’s not locked.” Jase chewed on his lower lip. “An invitation? Like it wants us to come on in.”

Pahl nodded. “There are old-fashioned laser sensors. Here and here,” he gestured with his tricorder to either side of the chamber. “All along the walls. Can’t see the beams, though.”

“Are they weapons?”

“No, the beams aren’t strong enough to burn anything. I think they’re meant to trigger some sort of mechanism.”

“Wait.” Jase bent, scooped up a small quantity of fine-grained dirt from the tunnel floor, and tossed the dirt into the chamber. The dirt was so fine that it formed a swirling cloud, like curls of smoke. Then, so ephemeral they were like the threads of a spider’s web, a network of thin, pulsing red lines appeared, crisscrossing the chamber.

“Sensors, all right. Displacement detectors, I’ll bet.” Jase looked over at Pahl. “And you want to go in there.”

Pahl nodded. “Don’t you? Can’t you feel it?”

“No,” Jase lied.

“Well, I do. It’s almost like a voice, only not words so much. Just a feeling. It’s not going to hurt us.”

“Then what? What is it? And why is it talking to us? Why not my dad?”

“I don’t know. Maybe your dad isn’t the right person.”

Jase took a step back. “I don’t understand that, and I think that until you understand something…until somebody tells us it’s okay, we ought to go back.”

“Well, I’m not,” said Pahl calmly. He snapped his tricorder shut and slung the carrying strap over his shoulder. “I’m going on, Jase. This is where I’m meant to be. You can go back. You know the way. Go get your dad, if that’s what you want. But I’m going.”

For a brief moment, Jase was tempted to do just that: to leave. The way he felt, staring at Pahl and then into the chamber, was just what he’d experienced aboard Chen-Mai’s ship. There was a terrible darkness in Pahl, a void scoured out of Pahl’s soul by grief and loss. This void was bottomless; Pahl’s need knew no end. Once before, the Naxeran had reached out without knowing what he was doing and grabbed hold of Jase, trying to pull him down into this black whirlpool, and Jase was afraid this would happen again. Only this time, Jase was being asked to walk, willingly, into the abyss.

Yet Jase knew this was something he had to do. Something was beyond that door, calling him, tugging at his mind. It had brought him this far. Maybe it would be satisfied with Pahl. Probably would. But then Jase would have abandoned his friend.

Jase shouldered his tricorder. “Let’s go.”

Together they crossed the threshold and stepped into the chamber.

Chapter 30

At first, nothing happened. Then Jase heard what he thought was a faint but audible click. Impossible. He frowned. They were in vacuum. Probably all he’d heard was the pop of static that sometimes played as background on an open comm channel. Then he became aware of something else: a rushing noise, like water.

He turned to Pahl. “Do you hear that?”

“Yes.” Pahl gave a slow, puzzled nod. “But how…?”

Groaning, the panel before them slid right: metal scraping rock.

Sound. Jase let out his breath in a surprised exhalation. There were sounds, and if there were sounds…Quickly, he whipped his tricorder around, activated it. “Pahl, it’s air. There’s air! And it’s getting warmer,” Jase watched as the ambient air temperature rose: now zero degrees, ten degrees. “It’s an airlock and…Pahl, do you see that?”

Pahl’s tricorder burbled. “Yes. I read a power source, about three kilometers ahead, almost straight down. Looks nuclear. Probably a generator of some kind, only down deep where it’s been shielded.”

“Or maybe our tripping the airlock turned it on. Except,” Jase aimed his flashlight, its beam stabbing the darkness, into the tunnel, “there’s nothing. Just more tunnel.”

He was disappointed because he’d expected something spectacular: a room heaped with piles of gold or jewels. Something. Why else an airlock? A metal door? The sensors, and shielding? Then he noticed something. Fanning his light over the tunnel walls, he caught a glimpse of color. Squinted. “I think there’s something here. Written on the walls. Paintings, maybe.” He consulted his tricorder again. “I’m reading more tunnels, but they don’t branch off here. There’s…” He did a double take of his readings, and his disappointment evaporated. “This is really strange. There’s another larger tunnel about a kilometer to the west, and then more…wow, at least tenmore tunnels branching off that. But, dead ahead, there are rooms.”

“How many?”

“Four.” Eyes bright with excitement, Jase looked over at his friend. “You know what? I think this isa tomb. I think the tunnel we found was some sort of secret entrance, that the bigger tunnel I’m reading to the west is the main entrance that was probably sealed off.”

“But why?”

“Grave robbers, maybe. They did that in Egypt. Sealed up the main tunnel after they moved the sarcophagus down and then left a different way, so no one would know how to get in. I’ll bet that if we walked down that main tunnel, there’d be the stuff you’d find in Earth tombs: booby-traps, pits, stuff like that. But I’ll bet that when we step out of here, that panel’s going to slide shut, just like any airlock.”

“And evacuate the air inside to equalize the pressure.” Pahl’s pale blue eyes looked almost silver in the glow of their flashlights.

“Yeah.” Jase aimed a significant look at his friend. “Probably we can get back out. At least, there’s air: oxygen, nitrogen. A little helium.”

“Like someone’s expecting us.”

“Yeah.” Jase hesitated, then reached up with both hands and thumbed the seals on his helmet. There was a hiss as the seals released. Cautiously, Jase lifted the helmet a few centimeters and sniffed. Instantly, he recoiled. “Ugh. Smells old, kind of stale. Thick. Like,” he made a face then turned and spat, “tastes like something…”

He stopped as he recognized the stench of death. And what else was he expecting? It’s a tomb, you jerk.Jase worked out another mouthful of foul-tasting spit. Of course, there’s something dead.

“Come on,” Jase said, clipping his helmet to his waist. He hoped he would get used to the smell. Otherwise, he would be forced to put his helmet back on; the smell of decay was that strong.

As Jase predicted, the panel slid shut behind them when they stepped away. Through the metal, they heard the swoosh and hiss of air being evacuated.

As they walked through the tunnel, Jase swung his light over the paintings on the wall. They were done over what looked like plaster, almost exactly the way he remembered tomb paintings from the Valley of the Kings, but the plaster here was very different: textured so that the images were arranged within outlines that were diamonds and trapezoids. Many of the patterns overlapped and intersected along diagonals, like—Jase groped for a comparison—like glass that had been shattered into a spider’s web of individual panels but not fallen out its frame. The paintings were probably of gods, Jase thought, or demons. He recognized one animal: a plump, ashen-white bull with long, pointed horns. He couldn’t quite place it; the name was on the tip of his tongue, and he knew he’d seen the painting before, someplace with his dad, some collection. He just couldn’t remember where.

There was one recurrent image: a great woman-snake, or maybe it was a dragon, Jase couldn’t tell. The thing had green scales, curved talons, and batlike wings; her eyes were set within ridges of scales and the same rhomboid-and diamond-shaped scales ran down the sides of her neck. Her neck wasn’t exactly straight either; it flared, so her shoulders and neck inscribed an arc, not an angle. In some of the paintings, the woman-snake hovered over figures that were clearly worshippers; Jase spotted humanoid figures carrying baskets of offerings—jewels, coins, food—and other figures that played upon piped instruments or harps. But in other paintings, the woman-snake formed the background for a figure that Jase thought must be the king: a jeweled diadem nestled on his forehead.

Playing his light over the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, Jase saw irregular, glittery white streaks of calcite, the end result of water having seeped through the rock over time. Probably from that big, dead lake.And he noticed something else. At first, it seemed a trick of the way the light from his torch spilled along the walls. But, no—he blinked—the tunnel was getting brighter.

He tapped Pahl on the arm. “Do you…?”

Pahl nodded and stared at his tricorder. “There’s light. Just ahead.”

The tunnel dipped left then right, took a last turn, and there was an arc of light straight ahead: the end of the tunnel. They hesitated an instant just beneath an arch, and then they crossed the threshold into a room.

In the room was a man with golden skin. Staring at them.

Jase flinched back with a cry. His heart thumped against his ribs, and his legs went watery with fear, and then he made himself look again. Almost at once, he wanted to kick himself for being so stupid. No, jerk. It’s not a man. It’s a statue. Jeez.

The statue was gold, its features inlaid with colored stones: rubies for the lips, coal-black obsidian eyes outlined in some dark blue gem, black crystals for nostrils. A green faceted stone (an emerald?) centered on the forehead: the king’s diadem. The statue stood before a stone altar that was a triangle three meters high; each side was flanked by a flight of three stone steps. Chiseled carvings of chimeras roiled along the altar’s three stone faces.

Everything in threes.Jase took a few steps toward the statue, and then turned to inspect the rest of the chamber. Jase saw that the tunnel they’d traveled came in from the side of the chamber, at a diagonal. The room was a rhomboid and studded at equal intervals with three curving stone pillars that arced from floor to ceiling. In each of the chamber’s four walls were three arched niches spaced at equal intervals, and within each were gold statues of women with peculiar diamond-shaped scales that ridged their eyes and long hair that spilled over their shoulders and breasts.

“An altar,” said Jase. He knelt on a step and his gloved fingers played over white smooth humps of material clinging to the rock. “Melted wax, like from candles. They probably did something religious here, prayers or something, before they left.”

“This way,” said Pahl, indicating a small passageway to the right of one statue. “There’s another room, much bigger.”

Once in the room, which was lit with a dim glow that seemed to have no source, they stood for several seconds, mouths open. Just staring.

“Oh,” said Jase, releasing his breath in an astonished gasp. His gaze traveled along the vaulted ceiling. The ceiling was painted a rich, dark blue and studded with glittering yellow stars. Like the sky at night, and there are two bigger than the rest, probably those binary stars.He saw at once that the paintings on the walls of the elliptical room—a dizzying array of red, blacks, and greens—were divided into three registers, with figures contained within intersecting rhomboids and trapezoids. Probably telling a story.Yet the story didn’t unfold in a straight line; the mural swirled along the walls. Jase spotted serpents, jagged bolts crashing through skies studded with blazing stars, the arcs of arrows curving in the air. The paintings felt organic and alive but suspended in time, in that instant between life and death every child knows but does not remember: the moment before he draws its first breath. Instinctively, Jase understood that the mural told a story of the hours of a single night. The story seemed to end with an image of huge golden disc at the far side of the room.

Jase took another step into the chamber. That disc had to be a depiction of the rising sun—maybe the neutron star before it had becomea neutron star. Just beneath the disc, he saw the woman-snake again, with its angry blood-red eyes, its shimmering green-scaled reptilian body. Those black wings.

He felt Pahl touch his arm. “Look,” said Pahl, pointing toward the center of the room.

Jase’s gaze followed. A red-stone, rhomboid slab stood in the center of the ellipse. Unlike the stone altar in the other room, however, this was carved with scrolls of ivy twisting around arcing columns incised out of the rock. Scattered on the floor were heaps of gold; dark wooden chests with latinum inlay and the rich green of jevonite; the crumbling remains of candles long since burned to nothing. And there was a body.

Jase and Pahl exchanged glances, and Jase saw Pahl’s throat work in a hard swallow. Without a word, they crept toward the slab and fanned their lights over the body. The skin of the dead man—and it had been a man, Jase saw (the king!)—was drawn tight as old black leather. As the skin had mummified, it curled and drew back; the lips were parted in a horrible rictus, the teeth startlingly white. As the soft tissues had decayed, the face had fallen in, and Jase stared into black, eyeless sockets. The cheeks were so taut the bones of the skull had torn through. Gold rings hung loosely on bone fingers; jeweled pendants and latinum chains dangled in the clefts between the dead man’s ribs where the flesh had rotted away, and the rich robes were reduced to shredded tatters. A deep, forest-green emerald glittered in the center of the dead king’s forehead.

So this is what his dad had been searching for. But was thiswhat he and Pahl had been meant to find? No. Jase felt as if there was still more…

“Over there,” said Pahl, echoing his thoughts. He nodded toward the far end of the chamber. “Through that arch.”

Unlike the burial chamber, this next room was pitch dark. The boys teetered on the threshold, and then stepped together into a thick, inky blackness. As if by unspoken agreement, they left their flashlights off for a moment and just absorbed the feel of the room. This room felt smaller, more dense. Jase had the impression of a diamond-shaped room, and his tricorder agreed. But the air was thick. Jase sniffed. Not musty but crowded,almost as if the darkness were filled with people jostling one another.

He felt Pahl at his elbow, searched for his friend’s eyes in the glow of their tricorders. “Do you feel it?”

Pahl nodded. “They’re here.”

They’re here.Without warning, all the hackles along the back of Jase’s neck rose. He shivered. Something was watching. Quickly, he flicked on his light; the blue-white halogen beam punched through the darkness. Jase whirled about on his heel, trying to catch whatever was there in the light. His beam cut the blackness. Stone walls. No paintings. Nothing else. No one.

No, thought Jase, there wassomething—someone—there. He felt it. Jase took a step back and then another, and then his heel caught. Crying out, Jase threw his arms up. His flashlight cartwheeled through the air. Jase fell back, hit something that rustled and chattered like icicles dangling from bare branches after an ice storm. Gasping, he rolled to one side, away from the sound, just as his nostrils were assailed with the musty odor of dust and decay.

Pahl’s torch flared to life, stabbed through the black, and Jase turned. Screamed.

The desiccated, mummified corpse of a boy slid out of the darkness.

Eyes bulging with horror, Jase scuttled away like a crab. He’d touched it; he’d fallen against it! And that clattering sound, his bones, the boy’s bones!Jase rolled to his knees, gasping. His skin was clammy with icy sweat.

Calm down, he’s dead, he can’t hurt you.Jase tried corralling his addled wits. Now that he was further away, he saw the body was slumped against a wooden triangular stand of some kind. Jase stood slowly, gulping air, heart hammering in his chest. There was movement by his elbow, and he almost screamed.

Pahl handed Jase the flashlight he’d dropped. “Look at his face,”Pahl whispered.

Despite his fright, Jase leaned forward. He frowned. “What isthat?”

Pahl knelt by the dead boy’s side. He reached forward, his fingers trailing along the contours of something that glinted and shone. “It’s a mask.”

“Don’t touch it!” Jase cried. Instinctively, he knew: danger.“Leave it alone!”

“Why?” Pahl continued to caress the mask. His movements were slow, languid. “It’s harmless. It’s…” Without warning, Pahl plucked the mask from the corpse’s face.

“No!” Jase cried, too late.

Suddenly, the room was suffused with a soft, silver light. There was a hum, a sense of expectancy. No, no, what now, what’s happening?Jase jerked open his tricorder.

“Pahl’s, something switched on. Another power source. Somewhere, outside this room, I don’t know, and now there’s an energy surge.” Jase jerked his head up. “Pahl, Pahl, let’s just go now. We’ve seen enough, we’ve seen…”

His voice died in his throat. He felt the same thick congestion in the air, only more now than before. Like the bodies of people all pressed together in a small room, all breathing the same air. The energy surge—Jase stared at his readings– like a door opening somewhere, letting something out, and it started when Pahl touched the mask, when he took themask. Jase stared wildly into the silvery glow. The air was thick, and as he stared, the air changed colors. The air trembled and writhed, and then the air uncoiled, coalescing into shapes, things that lashed the air like dragons. Like snakes.

“Pahl!” Jase’s voice came in a thin, high whisper. “Pahl, Pahl, do you see them? Do you see?”

“Yes.” But not a word: more like the hiss of some serpent. Pahl’s ice-blue eyes started from his skull, but he wasn’t looking at Jase. He was staring into the roiling air. “Yessss, yesssss.”

And then, before Jase could move, Pahl placed the mask over his own features.

“No!”Jase cried, starting forward. “Pahl, stop!”

Pahl opened his mouth and let out a long, loud wail. Jase couldn’t help it; he was so frightened, a cry jerked from his throat, too. Pahl’s scream echoed like the cry of a bat flinging itself from one dark corner to the next. His scream was inarticulate, formless: a never-ending wave of sound that went on and on, crashing through the darkness.

Jase’s mind gabbled in panic: no, no,no! He had to get that mask off Pahl’s face; he had to get them outof there!

“Pahl!” Lunging forward, Jase clawed at Pahl’s face. His fingers grazed the silvery metal, and it was like he’d touched a live circuit. A sudden, hard shock rippled down his hand and shivered through his arm. He flew back, his body twisting through the crowded, thick air. He crashed against the wooden stand, and the ancient wood, rotted with age and time, erupted, exploded from within, rising in a cloud of dust and debris. Jase felt the patter of wood against his skin, heard it rain upon the rock like hail. A brackish taste filled his mouth, and he spat out a gob of saliva and blood. He groaned. Every nerve ending of his body felt on fire. He tried moving, and electric shocks tingled through his limbs.