Even after the third heavy bang on the door—as if a concrete block were about to shiver the poor wood to splinters—Jack could feel excellent conclusions everywhere.
He recovered enough to step back. The fourth slam bent the door like a piece of cardboard and blew it from its hinges, twirling the jamb’s jagged splinter on a bent dead bolt. Wind blew into the living room. Somewhere, Jack’s rats squeaked. Despite the noise, the rush of wind, and the drops of rain, Jack did not feel afraid; his feet might as well have been glued to the thin carpet. A short, taut, bulky man in gray tweed entered and removed his flat cap with thick, ruddy fingers. His face was flat and pink as a doll’s, a hideous doll—and his eyes, small and efficient, swept the apartment and Jack with a minimum of motion. His instant smile was toothy and broad, like a Toby mug. He radiated sincerity and human kindness. “Good evening,” he insisted. His presence commanded respect—demanded cheer.
“Hello,” Jack said.
Through the frame of the broken door he saw a shadow loom, a heavy arm draw back, and at the end of the arm, an impossible hand—the hand of a comic book hero or villain, square-knuckled, fingers flexing with power and pain. The shadow drew into the light: a woman, very large. She rose up forever. Her face was the white of packed ice or bone china. Raindrops fell along the curves and dips of her whiteness, down to the tip of her blunt, large nose, where nostrils opened like black manholes. Her eyes opened to central, cataract blankness. A quick smile on her thick, greenish lips, glittering with moisture, revealed small, precisely socketed teeth. A scut of hair splayed out beneath her flat, ludicrous hat like dead gray moss.
The rats shrieked like terrified children. Both Glaucous and his companion had to be imaginary, Jack was certain. They had to be symptoms of the final and fatal dropping of all his marbles.
“Shall we come in?” Glaucous asked, though he was already through the opening. Jack used all his will to back off another step. He could almost hear the awful sweet glue pulling up beneath his soles.
The huge woman stooped to pass through.
“This is my partner,” Glaucous said. “Her name is Penelope.”
Jack sucked in his breath and half twisted, but the gnome’s sorrowful disappointment held him. Things seemed to fall into place; gusts of air, flits of dust, turns of tiny events conspired to hold him steady. That was interesting. That interested Jack no end.
Glaucous turned to say something more to his partner.
Jack unexpectedly broke loose. Momentarily free of the glue, nothing could have prepared him for the dread the pair exhaled, like the halves of a hideous bellows; they wheezed out terror. Without a thought, he dashed between world-lines, intruding on other selves—an unnoticed melding of ghost-soul upon ghost.
Yet something reached through and snaggedhim.
Glaucous pulled the adjacent world-lines in towardhis own—changed circumstance directly rather than fleeing it. Jack had never heard of such a thing—but then, he was young. He focused on the man’s power, his skill, trying to feel his way through to any possibility of shaking loose again. Glaucous was strong, but Jack was stronger at exploring all the available paths, despite the spreading treacle. He would not be held, even by these two; he would not be pinned.
Glaucous lowered his gaze. “You want to escape, but all ways seem good. Which way to turn? I am a happy fellow. All ways seem sweet to me—and thus, to you.” He flicked a round shoulder at his companion. “Penelope, he is not convinced. He wishes to leave us. Convince him.”
The large woman tilted her head back on her short neck and shrugged open her long brown raincoat, let it slide off. Her broad bare shoulders shone moist and dimpled like sweating dough. Jack could not look away.
Beneath the coat she wore no clothes, yet she was not naked. Dark masses covered her lumpish modesty. Her body was swathed in crawling clots of wasps—yellow jackets, thousands of them breaking and rippling in slow waves across her flaccid flesh, draped in buzzing shreds around knees and ankles, a living gown.
The one real horror of Jack’s existence, the one fate he could not elude: a swarm of angry, stinging insects. He had learned painfully that insect colonies and hives drew their own snarled road maps of fate, thousands of individual world-lines tangled like overcooked spaghetti, knots of furious determination. Wasps, bees, even ants—could fan out and block his decisions, mire his movement from strand to strand among the world’s infinite fates.
Wasps had helped teach him the limits of his talent, and had also sensitized him to their venom: one more sting would be enough.
They know what I am!
The wasps rose like black mist, evaporating from the woman’s body, zipping around the room. Revealed, Penelope was a stack of lumps, rolling heaves set upon legs like trees. She was not shy; her vacant smile did not change as wasps filled the apartment.
There was no way he could escape all the swooping, darting insects.
“Penelope, dear, let us do what we do best,” said Glaucous. “Let us help this poor young man.”
For a creature of her size, Penelope was swift, but Glaucous was even swifter. The room filled with grabbing hands and buzzing wings, small, hard, striped abdomens thrusting long stingers, faceted black eyes searching and hating until insects and humans seemed to become one. A noise like giant cards being shuffled, slapping, slamming, snappinginto place. Jack moved.
Before Glaucous could grab him with his outsized hands, Jack came unstuck from the treacle and dread and jumped across hundreds, thousands, of fates, whole cords of fates at once, the greatest effort he had ever made, greater by far than the effort in Ellen’s house—just to escape those awful stingers. Glaucous stared down at the young man lying limp on the floor, and a fissure of doubt appeared in his squat, craggy features. He remembered how wretched and disheveled the old crookback’s dying birds had looked as he tossed them into the road one by one for the rats to gnaw.
“Has he fled?” Glaucous asked, bending over the body.
“He’s right there,” Penelope observed, waving a huge hand on which wasps still crawled. Glaucous regarded Jack doubtfully. Jack’s eyes opened wide, filled with empty terror. Glaucous reached down and felt the boy’s pockets. In the light jacket—a piece of folded paper. He reached in. A shock tingled up his arm and made his teeth clack. As his hand withdrew, the paper came with it.
No need for Whitlow to confirm they had the correct prey. But he did not dare remove the box. Stone and quarry must be delivered together.
CHAPTER 35
The first far strand Jack reached shocked him nearly senseless. Seattle was being rocked by an enormous earthquake. He moved off that path with hardly time to feel the uplifting slam and careened through a flash-blur kaleidoscope of alternatives until the colors dulled and the flickering slowed and he hammered up against something he had never experienced—not that he had experienced anyof this before: a barricade or glassy membrane. For an instant he could almost see through it—but something pulled him back, protecting—restraining.
What lay beyond that membrane was worse than where he was, and where he was…
His flight stopped. He was stunned—he needed time to recover. No world-line had ever been like this. It felt dead.At the first breath, soot and ashes seemed to fill his nose and lungs. The apartment building he and Burke had once called home had not changed in size and shape, but all vitality had been sucked from its walls and timbers. A sick unsure light fell through the broken window. Paint dropped in slow flakes from cracked wall-board. The moisture in the air did not refresh his parched throat; it seemed to burn like a mist of acid. Off balance, he kicked out one leg—and stepped on a carpet of steel syringes, hundreds scattered over the floor.
Something moved in the corner of his eye and he spun about, crunching needles—this Jack wore thick-soled boots. He saw no one, nothing alive. The rooms were empty, silent but for the patter of falling flakes of paint. He lifted his bare forearms and held them close, unbelieving—flesh pricked by needle tracks, scabbed over, painful.