It lost all resemblance to a train, the way water scattered from a broken cup loses all order and definition. The various crawling and flying things of which it was made beat the rushing air with their wings, soaring up and out and away from the thing they had been constrained to be.
Some, inevitably, were crushed against the rails or flew headlong into the rock walls and ceiling. Cal smelled broken chitin and the blood of birds. But most of the captives simply scattered.
Distantly, Cal heard Mama Diamond call out to them, a command in a language he could not comprehend. With a great whoosh the flying mass of them whirled off into the dark unknown like chaff before a storm, and were gone.
Cal stood up slowly, beating a swarm of carpet beetles off his hair and skin and clothes. He was bruised where the body of a crow had struck him and scratched where another bird’s talons had raked across his face, but he was basically all right. He had managed to keep his grip on his sword, one hand curled around the hilt.
He turned back to the others, breathing hard, fighting to keep his legs from giving out under him. They were staring at him in awe, all but Stern and the wraith warriors, whose expressions were unfathomable.
“Let’s finish this,” Cal said.
Stern led them deeper into the mountain.
FIFTY-SIX
Jeff Arcott was dead, to begin with.
But Theo Siegel didn’t have time to ruminate on that, or agonize over it, or ponder the fact that no one would ever call him Theodore again.
Or even wonder if the life choices he’d made that had led to the inevitable moment of bashing in Jeff’s head with a steel pipe had been better, say, than going to vocational school or joining a cycle gang or simply running away to become a snake handler when he was ten.
Because although Jeff-or rather, the tragic, mangled, power-riddled vessel that had been Jeff-was no longer a threat to Melissa or Theo or anyone, the dark sensibility at the heart of the Source very much was.
At this given moment, It was summoning back every bit of the sickly, glowing energy It had disgorged out of the Spirit Radio onto the pavements and streetlamps and upright brick structures of Atherton, drawing it surging and splashing back the way it had come, like a tidal wave receding into the sea….
And drawing Melissa Wade with it.
Jeff Arcott had tried to whisper something in his last living moments, as Theo had crouched horrified over him.
But before Theo could discern what that might be, he’d heard Melissa’s wailing cry on the wind and spun to see her blown whirling away like a paper doll on the wind, engulfed in lambent dark energy.
She was twenty, forty, seventy yards from him now, blasting toward the ruined shell of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building and the portal within.
“Melissa!” he cried, and vaulted after her on thick powerful legs, through the churning emerald-topaz radiance that could buffet him and prick him like a thousand needle-hot wasp stings, but couldn’t possibly stop him.
Legs pounding, leaping over great swaths of concrete, Theo drove forward, cutting down the distance. He sensed dimly about him that, as it retreated, the luminance left behind only arid stone and dead foliage, leeching out every last ounce of life force, stealing it away for other, urgent use.
But not Melissa; it had taken everything else, had ravaged and perverted Atherton, corrupted and destroyed Jeff-
But it wouldn’t have her.
He could see the twisted skeleton of the physics building ahead of them now. What shone out from the interior of the building was not light but a kind of luminous darkness, a viscous black of such intensity that it made Theo want to shut his eyes.
Instead, he let out a savage cry and gave a last Olympian leap high into the air, reaching out with great wiry arms….
He struck Melissa midair, seized her by her frail midsection, held hard to her; close now, he caught the scent of her sweat and her Changing, pure and bitter, like some exotic herb.
But the compacted weight of him was not sufficient to bring the two of them down; they were still driving through the air, the momentum of his leap speeding them even more rapidly toward the inhaling maw.
Ahead of them, scant feet from the physics building, he caught sight of a splintered power pole, frantically stretched a long gray arm toward its gem-encrusted crossbeam. His fingers wrapped tightly around it, and the force of the wave carrying him pulled him horizontal as it tried to tear him away from the pole. But he held fast to it, and to Melissa, until his fingers on the faceted stones and rough wood were bloody, until his bones wanted to crack.
He howled his rage and his pain against the Storm.
He was still howling when the roof of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building came apart in an explosion of beams and tiles and rebar, plywood and brick and drywall. Pieces of it fell about the two of them like hail-some pieces big enough to crush them, though they were spared. Oddly, there wasn’t much sound. Only the soft initial thrump, and the pattering sound of debris raining down on Philosopher’s Walk.
The building was gone, and with it the light-darkness that had shone coldly out of it, and all evidence that the Spirit Radio had ever been conceived, built or activated.
Except for the two of them, clinging trembling to each other atop a power pole, Atherton was silent and dead and dark.
FIFTY-SEVEN
The holy ghost legion drove on, into the heart of the mountain that had been named after Charles Rushmore, a lawyer from far New York, and had been called the Six Grandfathers for time out of mind before that. The great reptile beast that had been a lawyer king flew on beside them, and also the flame-girl that had been a ballerina, now speeding like a hummingbird. The boy Inigo and his blade mother, too, and the other mortal beings who had journeyed long and hard, holding their souls in their hands.
They drove like a wedge, parting all that stood before them…for a time.
Then the Thing at the Source gathered Its forces, and brought them down.
“Where? Where is It?!” Cal was shouting at the top of his lungs over the clamor, the screams of the spectral horses, the cries and blows of his companions, the death screams of whatever ungodly nightmares were being thrown at them.
They were in the great hall now, Cal was sure of that, but there was no way to see that, because the Big Bad Thing was reaching into their minds, summoning forth all their bleakest memories and best-beloveds, the cornucopia and totality of their lives, to shape into solid form from the unborn clay, the writhing power at its command-to hurl these bloodless facsimiles at them to rip out their hearts, to kill them stone-cold dead.
The Ghost Dance Shirts Cal and his companions wore were growing less persuasive-perhaps there was a limit, a fading terminus to their power-and so they needed the added impetus of steel and grit and brawn.
“Torment me not, you fraudulent things!” Doc was yelling, his English growing absurdly formal with the stress, as he flashed his machetes and cut to ribbons the pustulent, glowing radioactive forms in ragged uniforms and other trappings, the dead of Chernobyl whom Cal knew Doc had tried to save long ago, and failed. There were others, too, Cal saw, a willowy woman and small girl, who flung themselves at Doc.
Doc could not bear to cut at them, but shoved them hard away; and Stern roasted them to whispers.
Colleen, too, was up to her elbows in a rogues’ gallery of men and women summoned from all the hours of her life, who launched themselves hissing at her. Women in business attire and tatty thrift-shop dresses, men in overalls and T-shirts and work clothes-and most notable of all, a handsome, weathered simulacrum of a man in an Air Force uniform that Cal saw she had the hardest time of all slicing and taking down, but did so with grim determination, her eyes brimming with tears.