“Pushed off?” echoed Lizzie. “But that would mean—”
The last print was right at the edge. There was only one direction to go in, and that was down.
Top got up and dusted his hands off. He cut me a look. “Probe, Cap’n?”
“Do it,” I said.
Bunny went over to one of our equipment boxes, opened it, and came back with what looked like a pigeon made from plastic. In his other hand, he held a small controller.
“Surveillance drone,” Bunny explained when Lizzie and Brock looked expectantly at him. “Specially made for scouting combat environments. Durable, covered in flame-retardant and heat-resistant polymers. You can send one into a burning building and get good video feeds from up to a mile.”
Bunny pressed a button on the pigeon, then handed it to Top, who held it ready over the edge. Then Bunny powered on the controller and gave a nod. Top hurled the pigeon high into the air and it immediately deployed its wings, flapped around until its internal gyroscopes and guidance were synched, and then dove into the smoke.
“Nice,” said Brock. “Haven’t seen that model.”
“And you’re not seeing it now,” I told him. He nodded.
“If Mr. Mercer jumped down there,” said Lizzie, “what do you expect to find except charred bones?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “If we find bones, then this investigation shifts lanes and goes looking for answers elsewhere. If not, then we reassess what we know of Mercer.”
She nodded, accepting that.
While the drone flew, Bunny frowned at the small video display on the control unit. “Lot of smoke. Shifting through the spectrum to see what I can see.”
A few seconds later…
“Wait, I think I see something.”
Then…
“Holy fucking shit,” cried Bunny. “Guys!”
We ran back to him. Bunny held the control device up and we crowded around to see the image. Top, Lizzie and Me. Brock stood to one side, unsure if he was invited but also clearly alarmed at Bunny’s tone.
On the screen the picture was hazy because of the smoke, but we could still make out what it was. It’s just that it made no sense.
It’s just that it was impossible.
It’s just that it sent a thrill though me that was not revulsion at seeing a burned body, or any other normal emotion. What I felt was an absolutely ice-cold knife of real terror stab its way straight through my heart. Lizzie grabbed my wrist in a hand gone icy; her grip was vise-hard. Top made a sound that was part gasp and part cry of strict denial.
James Mercer was down there. He was at the bottom of the burning pit. His clothes had all burned away. His flesh was cracked and splotched with brick red and charcoal black. His hair was gone.
But he was alive.
He knelt, naked and cooked alive, holding the big book out in front of him, reading from it even though blood and pus leaked steaming from his eyes. His cock was erect, and the skin bubbled with blisters that swelled and popped.
Spiders — tens of thousands of them — crawled all over his body, and swarmed around him, and scaled the side of the pit. And before Mercer, as if opened like a wound in the world, was a cleft. A kind of doorway. Light poured through it, brighter than the fires that flickered around him.
Through the speaker on the monitor we could hear the rustling of the spiders, the crackle of flames, the hiss of smoke and steam, and the constant, droning, inexorable mumble of James Mercer reading his prayers from the ancient book. The light from the cleft bathed Mercer in a hellish glow, and it showed us what all those spiders were doing down there.
They were eating the dirt — clawing at the living rock, dragging tiny bits of it away on either side of that obscene cleft. I stared at it on the screen and felt as if the whole world was tilting under my feet. Mercer, driven to madness, kept alive through some means that could not make sense in any way, not in the wildest, warped reinterpretation of reality as I knew it. And the spiders. Milling with constant energy. Tiny creatures trying to tear open a wall of solid rock. For those small monsters it was a labor assigned in the deepest pit of insanity, and the spiders worked with tireless diligence to widen the crack.
No.
They worked — as Mercer worked with the prayers his cracked lips recited — to open a door.
But… to where?
5
“WHAT’S THE PLAN, Boss?” asked Bunny. His voice was full of cracks. “’Cause if you don’t have one I have a suggestion.”
“Does it involve dropping a big fucking bomb right over there?” asked Top, pointing. “Because I’m all over that idea.”
“No!” cried Lizzie. “You can’t.”
“Why the hell not?” I demanded. “Right now it seems both poetic justice and good common sense to hit this whole area with a whole bunch of Hellfire missiles. I’m pretty sure — foreign soil or not — I can arrange that in under fifteen minutes. One, maybe two phone calls and it’s done.”
“No,” she insisted, her face going from flushed to deathly pale, “if you do that you’ll kill us all.”
“We’d actually drive away first,” said Top, forcing a smile onto his face despite the fear in his eyes.
“You don’t understand,” she said, “if you blow up the pit, if you destroy that book, then you let it out.”
“Let what out?” asked Bunny. “No, don’t tell me because I probably don’t want to know.”
She pointed to the pit. “Mercer tore off one page of the book and look what happened. That page, that small bit of damage to the book, did something down there. It opened a door. You can see it on the monitor clear as day.” She looked from Top to Bunny to me, her eyes wild. “Why do you think this book was guarded for all these centuries? For millennia? These books aren’t bullshit church politics or contrary doctrinal points of view. These are books of power. Real power. The darkest power you can imagine.”
We said nothing.
“If you’ve dealt with the Unlearnable Truths before, then you have to know how dangerous they are. How dangerous this book could be?”
“Wait… could be?” I bellowed. “You don’t even know if we can safely destroy it or not? Is that what you’re telling me?”
Brock and his marines, drawn by our raised voices, began hurrying over, but Top stepped to intercept them, arms wide, shaking his head. Brock slowed and gave us all an uncertain look. He retreated with great reluctance.
I leaned close to Lizzie and lowered my voice. “You don’t know?”
“No, Captain, I don’t,” she snapped, moving so close I could smell the fear in her sweat. “And because I don’t know, I can’t let you go off half-cocked and just bomb the hell out of the pit. We need to recover that book. We need to seal that — rift, or doorway, or whatever it is. We need to stop whatever Mercer is doing. Maybe then I can figure out how to seal the book again. Or, maybe I’ll find out that we can destroy it. But I’m telling you right now that your plan has a lot more ways to go wrong than mine.”
“You don’t actually have a plan,” I snarled.
Again, she pointed to the pit. “Sure I do. You need to go down there and get the book.”
Bunny said, “Fuck me.”
I closed my eyes.
“Jesus H. Christ,” I said.
6
BUNNY BROUGHT THE pigeon drone up and landed it on the rim, where it squatted, steam rising from it. We all ran for the car.
The equipment Church recommended we bring included Dragon fire-suits. The company makes a line of body armor for combat in virtually every possible circumstance, from deep Antarctic winter to cities on fire. The fire-suits were ultra-high-tech, costing over a million dollars per set. Lizzie and Brock watched as we stripped to our underwear and began pulling them on.