In a little while Davis's radio crackled, and call-signs began asking him was it all over? He told them yes, called down Chopper Two, told everyone they could start mopping up. But as he and his party began to make their way back towards the villa:
'What?3 said Jake, whirling on the balls of his feet. His eyes were wide and darting, searching here and there across the sculpted landscape of the gardens, and his ruddily-lit face was shocked and puzzled. 'Liz?' But then his eyes went wider still, in sudden understanding.
It was Liz he'd heard calling for him, yes, but she wasn't here… she was in Xanadu!
Jake! Jake, if you can hear me (her telepathic voice was a tiny, terrified whisper huddling in a corner of his mind), then please, please come and get me out of here!
And behind her sweet voice another — but a loathsome, gurgling thing — like hot tar bubbling in some medieval torturer s cauldron: Ah, no, my little thought-thief. No one can help you now. You though to use your mentalism against me, but Malinari has used it against you! I have lied to Ben Trask — impossible, but I have done it — and I've located and lost your locator. As for your marvellous precog: le senses nothing but confusion, for the death and destruction that he foresaw was his own and yours and Xanadu's, but never mine! And now there's this Jake — your lover, perhaps? But where is he? Oh, ha ha haaaaaa!
'Jesus!' Jake moaned. But he knew what he must do. Korath! he called out into the deadspeak aether. And:
About time, said that one. Butjirst tell me, do we have a deal, you and I, as prescribed? Do you wittingly give me access to your mind?
There was no way around it, and no time to argue. And so: Yes! said Jake. Anything! Only show me those numbers.
So be it, said Korath. And Jake's inner being lit up like a lamp, as those impossible numbers scrolled in not-quite-endless progression down the computer screen of his mind. But not quite endlessly, because he instantly recognized a pattern and suddenly, 'instinctively' knew where to freeze it. Then:
A door! And:
Go! said Korath. And I go with you…
Jake went — stepped in through the door — vanished from the view of Lardis Lidesci and Joe Davis, and was gone.
'What?' Davis stood stock still, frozen in his amazement. And for a moment even Lardis was lost for words, astonished as ever by this thing. But then he recovered and said:
'Pay no attention. It's a trick he does. Just an optic — er, an optical — er…'
'An optical illusion?' Davis's jaw hung slack.
'Aye, something like that,' Lardis said, gratefully. 'Er, but we needn't expect him back. He has his own ways of getting about, that one.' And once again, with a knowing, emphatic nod of his grizzled head, 'Aye!' he said…
In the ultimate, primal darkness of the Mobius Continuum, Jake whirled like a leaf in a gale. 'BUT WHERE TO?' he said, and
was nearly deafened as his words gonged like the clappers of a mad, gigantic bell!
The thought itself would appear to be sufficient, Korath told him, awed in his own right. For I sense this place is the very essence of nothingness, wherefore physical speech — which is something — is forbidden here. But deadspeak, being as nothing, is permissible.
Jake steadied himself— discovered that he could actually steady himself — and repeated, Where to? He could feel the Continuum tugging on him, and believed he knew where it would take him if he gave it the chance: Harry's Room, at E-Branch HQ. But that wasn't where he wanted to go.
Who is it you are concerned for? Korath remained logical.
Liz, of course! She had called out to Jake — asked for his help — and her telepathic voice had been a beacon. Now he remembered it, remembered its coordinates, and went to her. It was as simple as that. At least the going there was simple, but the rest of it wasn't.
When the door formed, Jake didn't know how to make an exit and so simply crashed through it. Into a living nightmare!
It was a room, shaft or cavern, but its lighting after the Stygian darkness of the Mobius Continuum was glaring, brilliant, blinding. Overbalanced as gravity returned (by the sudden, unaccustomed weight of the flamethrower), tripping and flying headlong into a wall, and rebounding, Jake landed on something soft and squirmy…
… Something that cried its terror, and two seconds later wrapped its arms around him.
'Jake, oh Jake!' Liz gasped, holding tightly to him on the one hand, but wriggling and kicking desperately away from something on the other. Her Baby Browning was clenched in her fist, and she kept aiming it and pulling the trigger — click! click! click! — as the firing pin fell on blank space. A pair of empty clips lay on the sandy floor where she'd discharged and discarded them.
It was the strip lighting that had blinded Jake, that and his dizzying, head-over-heels emergence from the Mobius Continuum. Now, as his head stopped spinning, he saw what had turned this determined, self-possessed, assertive woman into a frightened little girl again: weird, morbid motion.
The floor of the place was alive… or undead!
Jake could scarcely take it in — scarcely believe what he was seeing — but he had to, and quickly.
The cavern was the size of a large room. A planked walkway crossed the centre of the floor and disappeared into tunnels at both ends. On the other side of the walkway, maybe fifteen feet away, the floor was… different. It was humped, veined, corrugated… and mobile. And it wasn't the floor!
Something tossed and turned — or churned — there. Something throbbed and gulped and gasped. It was a fleshy, flopping octopus of a thing; an immense doughy pancake of metamorphic flesh, throwing up purple-veined extrusions that groped blindly in the air before collapsing back down into the bulk of… of It! The colour of dead flesh in its main mass, it squelched, fumed, and stank like gas bubbles bursting in a swamp. And mindlessly, aimlessly, it worked at fashioning its ropy extensions.
Or perhaps not mindlessly. For as Jake sat there cradling Liz, so the thing extruded a tentacle that came whipping across the walkway to rear before them in a questioning, semi-sentient fashion. It pulsed, vibrated, and an eye formed in its tip! The eye was a uniform red, lidless, apparently vacant — yet it must be seeing or sensing something. For as Liz shrilled and started pulling the trigger again — click! click! click! — so a second tentacle emerged and lengthened in their direction.
As it came, a row of greedy, suctorial mouths rippled into metamorphic being along its length. They slobbered and grimaced, those mouths — and they had human teeth! But far worse, some of them were reforming, shaping themselves into tumescent, purple-veined penises!
Jake felt rooted to the spot, for the moment paralysed. It seemed to him that the whole mass of the thing beyond the
walkway was now on the move, edging towards him — and certainly towards Liz! And that was enough.
He unfroze, fought Liz off, brought up the flamethrower's nozzle and squeezed the trigger to get its pilot light going — then cursed vividly as nothing happened, and squeezed it again, and again, and yet again, before it lit — then gripped the firing lever and applied a steady, deadly pressure.
First Jake aimed down between his spread legs, aimed at the rearing pseudopods, to drive them back, and his relief was immense as he watched them burst into flames and shrivel in the incandescent, pressured heat of his lance. Then he scrambled to his feet, and with Liz dancing close behind, clutching his combat jacket and urging him on, so he advanced towards the walkway and the bulk of the thing that hissed and steamed and shuddered its agony there.