“Cut that out, Howard!” Gillis barked, and Jerry pointed the gun at him. “You keep out of this!” he said. He was about to swing the gun again when the bolt on the door rattled and moved slightly. Jerry rushed over to it, letting Carlo collapse on the floor.
He pushed the bolt back hard with the butt of the pistol and it stayed. Jerry wiped his forehead and turned to look at his victim. “If it wouldn’t bring in the demons, I would kill him. If Killer dies, then I shall kill him for certain— if I can get to him before they do. Violence brings them… Take him in that other room and tie him up. Gag him. Move!” Graham always knew when to back off, and this was one of those times. He bent down, took hold of Carlo, and dragged him away. Jerry took a spoon from a drawer and knelt down to hold it over Killer’s lips. The laughter outside was louder, as though more demons were joining in.
Ariadne sat down on the sofa and started to shake uncontrollably. The laughter! She should go to Lacey, but Maisie was probably doing as good a job as she could, and she was all splattered with Killer’s blood. Jerry tossed the spoon away, listened to Killer’s chest again, and then stepped over him and sat down beside her on the sofa.
Graham came back, took the lamp from the piano, and returned to the bedroom. She heard linen being ripped.
“He may be all right,” Jerry said. “The wands have power to heal, and it has stopped the bleeding.” She tried to speak through chattering teeth. “He needs a hospital.”
“He needs Mera!” Jerry ran a hand through his pale hair, leaving it streaked with blood. “I’ve heard of this, though— the wand put him into some kind of coma; his heart beat is very, very slow, but it seems to be steady. Aku was saved this way once. I think it can hold him till morning.” The blood had not stuck to the wand, and the wand was glowing white.
Then he looked at her and suddenly put an arm around her. “Thanks, Ariadne. You were the only one who kept her head. God! I shouldn’t have battered the kid like that…” It was very comforting to be held. No one had held her like that in a very long time; there was no sex in that embrace, merely human contact and mutual comfort.
“You can’t turn off the sound effects, can you?” she asked, her voice a little steadier. “It sounds like a sitcom out there.”
“Whatever that is,” he muttered. “No. This is the chirping and gibbering stage, I suppose. They know they won’t fool anyone now, so they’ll try to drive us crazy.” She shivered and cuddled closer to him. His grip tightened.
“He’s tied up,” Graham said, behind them. “I can’t gag him— his mouth is bleeding too much. He’d choke.” Jerry stood up and gestured with the gun. “Right. Back in there, Gillis. You’re next.”
“I’ll behave, damn it!” Graham said. “I believe you now, Howard.”
“Move!”
She sat and shivered with her hands over her ears for a while. It was impossible to drown out that laughter— bellows and shrieks and giggling and chuckling, all around the cottage.
Drive us crazy… it wouldn’t take long. If Lacey was still shrieking or Maisie still praying, she couldn’t hear them.
Then the shadows danced and Jerry returned with the lamp. He put it on the piano again and came back to her side. They sat together and looked down at the motionless figure of Killer, lying on the floor like a corpse laid out for burial, clutching the wand.
“I’ve really loused up,” Jerry muttered. She could barely hear him over the gibbering. It was more a gibbering now, less like human laughter, more like a cage of apes. “I’m sorry, Ariadne. You deserved to get to Mera, and frankly our chances aren’t too good any more.”
“I can stand the noise if you can,” she said. “We’re none of us going to be inviting that lot inside.” Strangely, she was feeling better than she had done earlier— backs-to-the-wall syndrome?
“True,” he said… but there had been a hesitation there. “Give me the bad news, then,” she said.
“No— you’re right. We can wait it out.”
“Tell me, Jerry, please. I’d like to know the worst.”
He turned and smiled at her, and almost she thought there was admiration there. Who had given her admiration since… since Noah’s flood?
“Okay!” he said. “It’s just about hopeless, though. You saw that door? I had to force it shut and I thought I couldn’t.” She nodded. “So?”
“It’s the third wave,” he said grimly, watching her face carefully. “First the flesh and blood. Then the disembodied. But now… it’s as though it takes them time to gather their forces, and now we must be nearing the darkest hour. Dammit, this night can’t go on for ever!
Why are they so strong? What’s bringing them?”
“What’s the third wave?” she demanded as calmly as she could.
“The in-betweens. Griffins or sphinxes or basilisks— the monsters that aren’t one thing or the other.”
“Vampires and werewolves?” she said. “Stakes through the heart and silver bullets, like the old stories?”
He nodded. “That’s it. We do have silver bullets, truly. A silver bullet through the heart will kill most of the in-betweens, but I have an uneasy feeling that we’re going to get something big, really big. Maybe an antitank gun with a silver shell would do it.” He studied her and then blurted out, “You’re a brave woman, Ariadne!”
“When you’ve spent as much time in hell as I have,” she said, “it begins to lose its terrors.” He put his arm around her again, this soft-spoken, lanky man with his fair hair and bare chest, now dark with his friend’s blood. “I had hoped to rescue you from that hell of yours,” he said. “But I doubt that I’m going to make it. I should have liked to have shown you Mera, Ariadne. It’s a wonderful place. You deserve it.” Deserve it? She thought of the strange beds she had wakened in a few times— sometimes with smelly old men asleep in them beside her, sometimes with nobody there except hallucinations. She thought of gutters, of being mugged, of the drunk tank, of begging total strangers for small change. Deserve it?
She shivered. “No I don’t! Those things that Graham said about me were true, Jerry. If ever there was a fallen woman, it was me. I don’t deserve Mera, and perhaps that’s why your demons have done so well. It wasn’t fair of your Oracle to send you and Killer after one like me.” He turned his head away from her and looked down at Killer, his face shadowed. Something with claws rattled across the roof, and they ignored it.
“I told you that I wasn’t worthy of Mera, either,” he said. “I’ve never talked about it and I shan’t now… but I often think that many people in Mera…” His voice died away, and she said, “Why is he called Killer?”
Jerry chuckled. “Oh, I named him that; a pun on Achilles, is all. He loved it and insisted on it after that. He’s very childlike, is Killer, in many ways. He comes from a childlike culture. The early Greeks were a bunch of squabbling brats. Even the great philosophers who came after were sort of childlike, weren’t they? Asking questions like kids? The showing off and the fighting, the love of nudity and the homosexuality— they’re juvenile traits. Even their gods were a gang of quarrelsome, horny perverts.”
“I’d never thought of that,” she said. The racket outside was getting quieter, or else she was finding it easier to ignore.
He nodded to himself. “I don’t suppose they were all as bad as Killer; he’s an extreme case. People don’t change in Mera, Ariadne. They may get younger-looking as the wrinkles disappear, as hair and teeth grow back, but their natures don’t change after they get there. I arrived as a thirty-year-old and I’m a thirty-year-old now. I don’t have Killer’s adolescent wildness, but I’m not a seventy-year-old, either. You can learn things, but you don’t change. Killer is a boy with four hundred years’ experience. I was thinking last night what a superb guerilla fighter he would make with those qualifications.” He was mourning his friend. She thought that Killer would mourn a friend sincerely also, but not in quite the same way. His friendship would be much more easily granted than Jerry Howard’s, so Jerry’s would be a deeper, more precious, and more vulnerable thing.