My greatest concern was Greta. I expected her to come bounding out of some shadowed nook of debris at any moment. It was still morning, though, and I remembered Misrix having told me that the werewolves did not usually awaken till noon. This must have been the case, because I cleared the crumbling walls of the city with no incident. When I stepped out onto the fields of Harakun, I felt a great surge of energy, thinking, "I've done it. I have the book. I have the antidote." I ran like a demon.
I covered half the distance to the tree line where I had entered the fields the previous day before I began to lose my stamina. A sharp pain had developed in my left knee, causing me to gallop awkwardly like Quismal inspired by fear. Still I kept going, heaving for air. "How many times am I going to have to dash across these damn fields," I thought to myself as the sun began to work its harsh process on me again.
Then, nearly three-quarters of the way to the cover of the trees, I turned my ankle in a hole and fell forward. The book slipped from my grasp, twirling upward as I went down. In its ascent, it opened, releasing the symbol-laden pages like a pod bursting, its white seeds flying everywhere. I gathered myself up and stood, stunned for a moment amidst the snow squall of falling paper.
Having no time to feel thwarted, I immediately set to gathering the pages together. I thought, "If I can just find that one that has the eye, the hourglass, and the circle on it, I can leave the others behind." They all appeared the same, though, as I chased them down and added them to my stack. When I turned to gather those that had fallen behind me, my sight was attracted to something in the sky. At first I thought it was a bird, but then saw that it was far too large for that. The wingspan was enormous and it was closing fast, swooping low over the fields. "Misrix," I said, and frantically began searching again for the page.
I lifted three more sheets of parchment, and then, approaching a fourth, I saw it, an eye looking back at me from the top of a column of symbols. Falling to my knees, I reached for it, but the action of the demon's wings as he landed, blew it away from me.
"Damn you" I said, standing, seriously preparing to fight him. "I warned you I would tell your father about the wolf girl."
Misrix laughed. "Cley," he said, "you're mistaken. It is me from your own time. I finally broke through into the memory world. I am here to take you back."
"No," I cried. "I'm not going back. I'm not finished here."
"We can't wait. My father's condition has grown worse, and the memory world, all of it, is disintegrating."
"I must see Anotine. I promised her I would return."
"You can't. Cley, she is just a thought. You are risking both our lives by delaying for nothing more than a spark, a breath of air."
"Don't say that about her," I said. I could see what I had to do then. I walked forward as if I was resigned to going. When I drew within a foot of the demon, I balled my right hand into a fist and putting all of my strength behind it, punched him squarely in the jaw. He reeled backward and fell over onto the ground. The second he went down, I scrabbled over to where the page had blown and retrieved it. Without checking to see what condition Misrix was in, I again made for the tree line.
I heard his wings above me before he landed on my back. His arm came around my throat from behind, and he tried to subdue me by preventing me from breathing. Stopping short in my stride, I ducked forward and he flew over me, but at the last second, grabbed my shirt and pulled me down on top of him. We wrestled fiercely, turning one over the other across the ground. Finally, his superior strength won out and he sat atop me, his left hand clutching my throat.
"I can't let you stay," he said, and then brought his right hand down with great force, smashing me across the face with the back of it. As I lost consciousness, I felt myself losing Anotine, and I knew exactly what it was like to die.
We were flying low through the night sky of Misrix's mind, over the forests of the Beyond.
"I lost track of you when the island disappeared," he said. "I had to search innumerable memories in order to find you. It took hours. I thought you would both perish."
I felt very weak and completely blank.
"The antidote, did you find it?" he asked, soaring upward into the night sky.
"It's the beauty," I said. "What else? Sheer beauty."
He reached the pinnacle of his ascent, then began the downward rush into our own reality. Somewhere in the descent, I passed into a deep sleep that was mercifully dreamless.
I opened my eyes, and found myself sitting in the chair in the room that contained Below's bed. My feet were up on the bench, and I was in the same position as when Misrix had placed his hand upon my head and initiated the dreaming wind. Looking to my left, I saw the demon, hunched over his father's body, administering a dose of the beauty to the vein in the old man's neck.
My muscles were cramped from having sat in the same position for so long, and I needed Misrix to help me to my feet.
"It took four hours," he said, as he wrapped his arm and wing around me for support.
We moved slowly toward the door. The pain in my knee I had gotten from running across the fields in the memory world had followed me back across time and space and now throbbed. Leaving the room, Misrix turned back and closed the door behind us.
Once I was sitting at the table in the room I had eaten in earlier, puffing on a Hundred-To-One, a cup of shudder sitting in front of me, the demon sat down. I still felt drained, both physically and emotionally.
"I feel dead," I said, letting out a trail of smoke.
"You look it too," said Misrix. "You spent too much time in the mnemonic reality. Your coming out was like an infant leaving the womb."
"I'm empty," I said.
"Cley, I wasn't going to tell you this, but I found the cure for the sleeping disease before you did. In an earlier memory of my father's, I stumbled upon him just as he discovered that the beauty would reverse its damage. I had to come and get you, though. You've got to live your life. If there was any way I could have brought the woman out, I would have. Can you forgive me?"
"I find it truly insane," I said, "that I have searched for love my entire life, and finally, when I found it, it was in the mind of a man who I considered to be a symbol of pure evil."
"But do you forgive me?" he asked.
"There's nothing to forgive. You are the only one of the three of us who operated out of truth. Your father and I were deceitful, he toward the world, and I with myself. You were right about something else also," I said, and took a sip of shudder.
"What?" asked the demon.
"It turned out to be a love story."
30
MISRIX LEFT THE ROOM IN ORDER TO GO CHECK ON BELOW and see if there was any change in his condition. Meanwhile I sat listlessly, staring at the wall and smoking one cigarette after the other. I knew now what it was like to lose someone close to you. Granted, Ea and Aria and their children had left and gone away to the Beyond, but at least I knew they were still out there somewhere. Anotine, on the other hand, was as good as dead now. I could remember Below's memory of her, but I could never again be with her in the same way as I had. "She must think I betrayed her," was what I kept saying to myself. Although I had returned to reality in one sense, the loss I felt was like a barrier that continued to separate me from it.
Quite a long time passed, and when the pack of Hundred-To-Qnes was empty, I realized that I had to begin thinking about getting back to Wenau and administering the Beauty to those trapped in the sleep. I was about to get out of my chair and go in search of Misrix when the door opened and he entered, followed by Below. To my surprise the Master no longer wore the blue pajamas, but was now dressed in a formal-looking black suit with a broad-brimmed hat on that I could have sworn had been Mayor Bataldo's. He walked upright and showed no ill effects from the long illness he had just come through.