Back when I worked with Carnacki the Ghost Finder, he'd used a charm of Banishing on a psychenaut, driving it out of a haunted funfair, and afterwards I pocketed the charm when he wasn't looking. He had loads of the things, and I had a feeling it might come in handy someday. I dug through the various mystical junk that accumulates in my pockets and finally hauled out a golden coin that came originally from the land of Nod. It had writing on it no-one could understand, and a face that was mostly worn away, but still subtly disturbing. I've never liked relying on such things, but needs must when the Outside is kicking down your door. If it didn't work, I could hardly go back to Carnacki and complain. Objects of power rarely come with warranties.
I held up the coin and spoke the activating Word of Power, and a terrible light radiated from the coin, too bright and piercing for merely human eyes. I had to turn my head away, and my hand holding the coin felt like it was on fire. The Banishing leapt out into the Hall, eager to be about its implacable business. It roared through the Hall, speaking words in a tongue older than Humanity, tearing the animating spirits out of the physical creation and forcing them back, down through the bottom of the world, back into the underpinnings of reality. The psyche-nauts were gone, and with them the overpowering emotions and debilitating fears. The walls and the floor and the ceiling grew still and solid again, and the wooden arms holding men and women fell apart into splinters. People looked slowly about them, daring to believe the worst might be over.
And Sandra Chance said, in a heartbreakingly matter-of-fact voice, "Something else is coming."
It was another psychenaut. A traveller from a higher dimension this time. We could all feel it coming, could feel
Something unbearably vast descending into our reality. Something so impossibly big it had to compress itself to fit into our narrow Space/Time continuum. Everyone's first impulse, including mine, was to run, but the sheer force of the approaching Presence held us helpless where we were, like mice in the gaze of the serpent, or insects caught in the heat focussed through a magnifying glass. Something finally materialised in the Great Auction Hall with us, so huge and powerful it hurt our minds even to think about it, drawing everything towards it like a massive gravity well. It was too Real for our limited reality; so Real it sucked everything else into it.
The Presence settled heavily into our world, spreading out in directions we couldn't even name; something Huge and Vast downloaded from a higher dimension. Its thoughts smashed into everyone's minds, as harsh and merciless as a spotlight, searching for the single significant thing that had brought it to this petty, limited place. It didn't take a genius to realise it must be looking for the chaos butterfly. The only truly unique thing at the auction. The psychenaut couldn't seem to locate it exactly for the moment, presumably because of the stasis field holding the butterfly temporarily outside of Time and Space. And so the Presence sank deeper into people's minds, forcing their very selves away in its search for knowledge. All around me people were crying out in pain and shock and horror, shrieking Get it out of me! Even the major players were on their knees, sobbing and shaking. The only one left mostly unaffected in the Hall was me, and I didn't want to think why.
The psychenaut wasn't used to thinking in only three dimensions, but eventually it would locate the chaos butterfly, if only through a process of elimination. The pull of the gravity well was growing steadily stronger. Details of this world's reality were being stripped away and sucked in, absorbed by the Presence. Not because it chose to, but just because of what it was. The teddy bears lumbered towards it, drawn by some inexorable summons, only to fall one by one to the floor, reduced to just toy bears again. Terrible changes swept through those people closest to the Presence. Suddenly, some could only be seen from the back, no matter which way you looked at them. Faces lost their individuality, becoming blank and generic. Details of clothing disappeared as though smoothed away by an unseen hand, then lost their colour. People became black-and-white two-dimensional photographs, and finally just chalk drawings, until all they were was sucked into the gravity well. Stripped of everything that made them real.
I made myself ignore the screams and howls of the damned around me, thinking hard. The charm of Banishing wouldn't work on anything as powerful as this. Hell, nothing I had would even touch it. Powers as significant as this hardly ever gave a damn about lower dimensions like ours. This one was only here because of the chaos butterfly. Presumably because whoever finally took charge of it, the ability to predict and maybe control the future would have repercussions up and down the dimensions. So the Psychenauts would just keep coming, from up and down the line, until one of them finally found the butterfly. And none of them would care how much damage they did to this world and the people in it. So there was only one thing left to do.
I lurched over to the glass display cases, forcing myself against the terrible pull of the gravity well, until finally I stood before the case holding the chaos butterfly. It hung there in its stasis field, such a small thing to hold such potential power. I reached out for the case, and Wilde cried out, afraid I was going to kill the butterfly, even after all its presence had brought about. I used my gift to find things, opening the third eye deep in my mind, my private eye, to locate the necessary Word of Power that would collapse the stasis field.
I said the Word, the field collapsed, and the butterfly disappeared, free at last to return to the moment in Space and Time from which it had been snatched. And as it moved on, it became just a butterfly again, no longer significant, no longer the first domino in any line of destiny. And so became ordinary again, of no importance to anyone at all.
The Presence snapped out of reality in a moment, no longer interested, and the gravity well was gone. All across the Hall people collapsed, mostly in gratitude that their ordeal was over. I sat down with my back to a reliably strong and solid wall and let myself shake for a while.
Of course, not everyone was pleased with the way things turned out. Deliverance Wilde, for example, wandered miserably around the Hall saying I could have been rich, rich, rich... She could have been dead, in any number of unpleasant ways, but I was too much of a gentleman to point that out. And many of the people who'd come to bid for the butterfly came up to ask pointedly whether I couldn't have found some better way to deal with the problem. I gave them my best hard look, and they went away again. An awful lot of people were dead, or much diminished, so I helped the Auction Hall staff pile the bodies up in one corner, for the Authorities to deal with, when they finally showed up. No-one else wanted to help. Most people couldn't get out of the Hall fast enough. I decided it might be best if I was long gone, too, before Walker and his people turned up, asking awkward questions. I said as much to Wilde, and she nodded slowly.
"I suppose I could always try and track down another chaos butterfly ..."
I silently indicated the wreckage and the piled-up dead, and she shuddered.
"Or perhaps not."
"Stick to fashion," I said, not unkindly. "It's a lot less dangerous."
She managed a small smile. "Lot you know," she said, and drifted away.
I went back to Grave, looking mournfully round her devastated Hall, and told her where she could send the cheque for my services. She glared at me.
"You don't seriously expect to get paid, after this debacle?"
I gave her my very best hard look. "I always get paid."
She thought about that for a moment, then said she quite understood my point. I smiled, said good-bye, and went back out into the Nightside.