He was by no means certain that these sights were real the way the body lying beside the temple pool below had been real. Perhaps they were simply thoughts in the head of lad Uroboros, and he was present in the midst of some ladic vision of heaven and helclass="underline" a firmament of unfinished angels, a pit of nonsenses and in between a sprawling and infinitely complex web of knotted and corrupted memories.
There were places, he saw, where the strands seemed to become clotted, forming large, almost egg-shaped masses. His curiosity as to their nature was enough to propel.him; he'd no sooner puzzled over them than his spirit was moving towards the largest in his immediate vicinity. The closer he came to it the more its appearance distressed him. Whereas the encrustations on the web were organic, the surface of the egg was of another order completely. It was a mass of overlapping forms, like the pieces of a lunatic jigsaw, each failing to quite mesh with the one below, and each worked with an obsessively complex design.
Nor was its appearance the only source of distress. A sound was emanating from it; or rather, several sounds, warming together. One was like the whispers of children; was a slow, arrhythmical throb, like the beat of a failing art. And the third was a whine that wormed its way into Joe's thoughts as if to disconnect them.
He was tempted to retreat, but he resisted, and pressed his spirit on, more certain with every moment that there was great pain here; nearly unendurable pain, in fact. The surface of the form was a catalogue of lunatic motions: tics and spasms and twitches, the jigsaws pieces coming away in a hundred places like shed scales, while others, thorny and raw in their budding form, unfurled.
Off to his left, something iridescent caught his eye, and he looked its way to see that the shedding had momentarily revealed what lay beneath this maddened, whispering mass. He moved towards it, and for the first time since approaching the egg had the sense that his presence had been noted. The motions became more fevered the closer to the sliver of iridescence he came, and all around the place the scaly pieces oozed a dark fluid, as if to conceal the spot while they bred a more permanent cover. Joe was not deceived. He closed on the sliver, certain there was some vital mystery here, and in response the motions became more frenzied until suddenly the tremors seemed to reach critical mass and a dozen shapes rose from the surface, surrounding him.
None of them made much literal sense. He could not distinguish a limb, or a head, much less an eye or a mouth. But they gaped and twitched and swelled in ways that evoked a parade of abominations. Something gutted, but living; something aborted, but living; something decayed into muck, but living and living. Though he'd left his body behind him and thought himself free of it, these horrors reminded him of every wound he'd ever suffered, of every sickness, of every weakness.
He had come too close to the iridescence to be frightened off, however. Turning his sight from these manifestations he slipped through their net, and into the midst of whatever secret they concealed.
He was delivered into a curving channel, down which he flew. It rapidly began to narrow, and narrow, as though he were in an ever-closing spiral. The light that had called him here did not diminish as he traveled, but remained steady as the curves tightened, the channel so narrow now he was certain a hair could not have been threaded through it. And still it grew narrower, until he began to think it would wink out of existence completely, and perhaps take him along with it. He'd no sooner formed this thought than his progress seemed to slow, until he was barely moving. Even at a creeping pace, however, the spiral was here so tight he kept turning and turning on himself, until at last all motion ceased. He waited in the gleaming channel, puzzled. And then, slowly, the realization rose in him that he was not alone. He looked ahead, and though he could see nothing, he was aware that something was staring back at him.
He returned the gaze, without fear, and as he did so images began to erupt among his thoughts: beautiful, simple images of the world he'd left behind.
A field of lush grass, through which a tidal wind was moving. A porch, overgrown with scarlet bougainvillea, where a child with white-blonde hair was laughing. A doughnut shop at dusk, with the evening star above it, set in a flawless blue. Somebody was dreaming here, he thought; yearning for the Helter Incendo. And it was someone who had been there and seen these sights with their own eyes.
Human. There was something human here. A prisoner of the lad, he assumed, trapped in this gleaming spiral, and guarded by reminders of flesh and its frailties.
He had no way of questioning it; no way of knowing if it had simply folded him into its visions, had comprehended that it was no longer alone. If the latter, then perhaps he could liberate it; lead it out of its dreaming cell. He turned his curious spirit around, and began to make his way back along the channel, hoping that the prisoner would follow. He was not disappointed. After a few seconds of travel, the channel widening once more, he glanced back and felt the eyeless stare upon him.
The escape, however, was not without consequence. Even as he picked up his pace, fractures appeared in the walls around them, and the fluid he'd seen ooze between the scales when he'd first approached the channel trickled into view. It was not, he now comprehended, the blood of the lad, but rather its raw stuff, turning even as it appeared into the same wretched, sickening forms. But for all their burgeoning vileness, there was something about their spread that smacked of desperation. Did he dare believe that they, or the mind that directed them, was afraid? Not of him, perhaps, but of whatever came on his spirit-heels; the dreamer he'd woken with his presence?
The further the two spirits traveled, the more certain he became that this was so. The fractures were fissures now, the lad's mud spilling into their path. But they were quicksilver. Before the Iad could block their path with atrocities they were escaping the spiral, dodging between the entities that had risen from the prison in all directions. Some seemed to have fashioned wings from their flayed hides, others had the appearance of things turned inside out; others still were like flocks of burned birds, sewn into a single anguished form. they came after the escapees in a foul horde, their whispers rising to shrieks now, their bodies colliding with the strands and dragging them after, so that when Joe glanced back the web was shaking in all directions, and sending down a rain of dead matter, which beat upon his spirit like a black hail.
It rapidly became so thick, this hail, that he lost contact with the dreamer completely. He tried to turn back and find his fellow spirit, but the horde had grown apace, and came at him like a raging wall, pressing a gust of hail ahead of it. He felt himself struck over and over, each assault beating him back and blinding him as it did so, until he could no longer see the dome or the pit, or anything between. He reeled in darkness for a few moments, not knowing which way he had come, and then, to his astonishment, a blaze of light enveloped him and he was failing through the empty air. Below him he saw the dream-sea churned into a frenzy by the Iad's approach, and beyond it a city in whose harbor the ships were lifted so high they would soon be pitched into the streets.
It was Liverpool, of course. In the time he'd adventured in the lad's head or belly the creature had strode across Quiddity, and was almost at the threshold between worlds. He had time, as he fell in the midst of lad's hail, to look along the shore towards the door. It was still wreathed in mist, but he could see the dark crack, and thought perhaps he glimpsed a star gleaming in the sky over Harmon's Heights.
Then he struck the waters amid a hail of ladic matter, and before he could free his spirit of its weight a wave rose beneath him, and bearing him up amid a raft of detritus, carned him on towards the city streets, where it left him, stranded in the shadow of the power that had shit him out.