There was no goddamned way I was gonna stop September 11th. An’ there was no goddamned way I could know if saving Annie might be the one thing giving the Master a chance to snatch back the dark magic eating up her lungs, and twist it backward in time a little to find the susceptible hearts and souls who could do something unthinkable.
I said, “But it already happened,” again, an’ sat down again with my face in my hands. It already happened, and I didn’t see a way outta this. If I tried saving Annie an’ the towers fell, I couldn’t ever know if I’d helped make that happen. If I didn’t and they fell anyway, I was wasting my one chance. And if I didn’t an’ they didn’t fall, then my future memories were wrong too, an’ I couldn’t trust any of this at all.
Joanne had been real reluctant to take up her healing powers, to become a shaman, back in the beginning. She hadn’t wanted to be a hero. For the first time ever, I started wondering if the girl hadn’t had a point. Being a hero had a down side darker an’ harder than I’d appreciated until just now.
“We do the Lower World,” I finally said, feeling dull an’ thick as a board. “Guess we can’t risk more’n that.”
“Gary?” Annie knelt when I sat, frowning up at me. “What’s wrong?”
“One of them future flashes,” I said, still talking into my hands. I’d seen Jo do that a hundred times over the last year. Never thought I’d be doing it myself. “Something ugly that I’d hate to learn was cause and effect working here.”
“We see patterns where there are none,” Hester said, all unexpected. She still sounded sharp as pins, but she sounded like she was tryin’ ta be sympathetic, too. Annie and me both looked at her and she said, “Humans. We see patterns where none exist. It’s a survival technique. I realize I’ve just warned you about potential ramifications, but you should also understand that because you see a pattern or a connection doesn’t mean there is one. We would all be forever unable to act if we knew what butterfly effect our every activity might cause.”
“Or our every inaction,” Annie said. “Gary, you look worse than you did this morning when the doctor said I was sick. What’s wrong? What did you see?”
“Nothin’ anybody’s gonna be able to stop.”
Hester’s eyebrows wrinkled together. “You’re precognitive?”
“It’s just a passing phase.”
For about half a minute Hes just sat there, looking between me and Annie like we were something she never imagined showing up on her doorstep. Then, like she was pulling all the pieces of her curiosity back and putting ‘em in line where they belonged, she said, “Shall we perform the Lower World journey?”
“Will Gary be with me?”
Hester’s mouth flattened. “I don’t think I could keep him out.”
“All right, then.” Annie finally settled back down with me, curling up in the blanket even though it was plenty warm in there. Hester went back to beating the drum, and after a minute started singing something about gates and doors and passageways. I started getting fussed about that not being the way Jo did things, then let it go. It didn’t take long for the sauna to start fading in and out, an’ then for a pathway to open up through one of the walls. Annie shifted, looking from it to Hes, then got up and walked into the Lower World.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I knew what to expect ‘cause Joanne had told me about the Lower World more than once, but seeing a red sun hanging low in the sky like it wasn’t ever gonna get higher was a whole lot different from knowing that’s what was there. A lotta the earth was red, too. The horizons were too close and lousy with mountains. Blue clouds lingered around ‘em, though above us was clear except for being a shade of yellow I’d only ever seen in Jersey. Mosta the plant life had a purple tinge, an’ it was all rainforest-big, though the air wasn’t that humid.
Annie stood on an orange pathway in the middle of all that, staring around in wonder. The path didn’t go anywhere but backward, but I didn’t guess it had to. Hester stepped past me and looked around with a click that sounded satisfied. “This will do. Are you comfortable there, Mrs. Muldoon?”
“What? Yes, I’m fine. This is…this is astonishing. You said it’s called the Lower World?”
“In the shamanic spirituality I’ve studied, yes. It has other names and other faces in different cultures. Here the animistic nature of all things can take on an aspect we can more easily communicate with. That’s why we can fight your illness here in a way Western medicine wouldn’t understand.” Hester stomped a circle around Annie while she was talking, stopping four times to make some kinda little gesture. “Mr. Muldoon, I understand you want to help your wife through this, but this fight has to largely be her own. I’d like to put you in a separate protective circle. I can link them together, if you prefer, but you may not cross from one to the other.”
“That sounds like a rotten plan.”
“Don’t be difficult, Gary.”
“All right, all right. Hey, wait!” I’d been carting Jo’s rapier around for a slow ride through forever, but I’d stopped carrying it when Horns had dropped me into my own story. I reckoned that shouldn’t matter, especially in the Lower World, and especially since I’d seen Jo draw it outta nowhere any number of times. I concentrated on the feel of the thing, the heavy silver an’ the complicated guard, and let myself think, just real quick, about the quiet misty homeland Cernunnos had brought me to for a while. A shiver ran down my spine an’ back up again, resonating across a couple worlds, but the god-blessed sword glimmered an’ came to life in my hands. I clutched the hilt like I was hugging it, then handed it over to Annie while trying not to see how she an’ Hester were both gaping.
“This used to belong to Horns. The fella who tackled you outta the way of the car back when you were a kid. I figure he’s got your back, so maybe this thing’ll do you some good.”
I could see her working her way past a hundred questions, tryin’ ta focus on the most important thing: “Gary, I can’t use this, it’s too…big…”
We were all watching when it happened. The silver kinda shriveled and shrank, melting in on itself inside of a blink, until the whole sword was about fifteen inches shorter than it’d been. My jaw flapped open. It’d never done that before, not that I could remember. A’course, Jo and Cernunnos were pretty close to the same size, an’ I wasn’t that much bigger, so we could all use the same-length blade. Annie hefted it a couple times now, searched for something to say, and came up with, “That’s better.”
Hester’s eyes were near to falling out of her head. “Who are you?”
“Sorry, sweetheart, I’m just a guy. Do your thing, doll. Build me a circle. I’ll stay put.”
Hes ground her teeth together, but she nodded an’ stomped away. Annie and me exchanged a smile, and I was looking right into her eyes when a monster burst outta her chest and attacked her.
I swore she knew it was coming. There was nothing of my surprise in her eyes. I was still gathering breath to yell and she was already falling into guard, slapping a mass of ugly away like it wasn’t much more than a fruit fly. I wondered if she’d had a hint it was coming, some kinda pain inside her, but I guessed it didn’t matter, at that. She and it were circling each other, keeping to the edges of the power circle, an’ Hester and me were standing outside in horror. I swallowed my yell, not wanting to distract Annie. Hester vibrated with indecision, twitching forward like she’d jump in, then flinching back like she didn’t wanna distract Annie either.
The thing she was fighting didn’t look like any kinda monster you could name out of a book. It looked like sickness oughta: a black writhing mass of nastiness, fulla teeth an’ hateful eyes and tar lashes. It looked like a bad cold felt, something heavy and ugly weighing down your chest, sucking away your ability to breath. It looked like a heart attack felt, pain running up and down your arm and pressing down on you ‘til stars came into your eyes. An’ all I could think, watching Annie circling around and watching it, was that at least right now it was out of her, an’ that might give her a fighting chance.