“No! You don’t want to!” The illusion’s tugging hand became more insistent, pulling Sarah back a few steps. “Come on.” It’s nothing, she told herself. It can’t be anything at all. Her own voice, strident inside her head, insisted upon that. Whatever was in the darkness at the other end of the corridor was nothing, a ghost or hallucination, a cobbled-together fragment of the dead past, as insubstantial as the image of the little girl yanking at her hand. What was there to be afraid of? This is what I came down here to find out, she told herself, her voice shouting above both the thunderous footsteps and the trembling of the blood in her veins. All the pleasant notions of childlike tea parties, of curling asleep and dreamless beneath the ocean waves, had vanished, scoured clear by the rush of adrenaline through her body.
“Let’s go!” screamed the child.
Sarah angrily jerked her hand free from the image’s grasp. “Go on, then!” Her shout tightened the cords in her throat. “Get out of here—I don’t care. You want to leave, go ahead—you’re not even real!”
Tears coursed down from the girl’s dark eyes. “I won’t go without you The voice, the audible hallucination, could barely be heard against the other, greater one pounding through the Salander 3’s corridors. It sounded now as if some unseen force was driving a sledgehammer into the walls, the metal deforming and shimmering from the distant and approaching violence. “I found you!” howled the Rachael child. “You were lost and I found you! I’m not going to let you go—”
Face reddened with weeping, the child tried to grab Sarah’s hand again. Sarah snatched it back, raising the hand almost to shoulder height, as though she were about to slap the image and drive it away from her. “Go away! I don’t need you! Don’t you understand? You don’t exist—”
The child had cowered away from the undelivered blow, her own arm brought up to her face to protect herself. She lost her balance as another impact, louder and more violent than all the ones before, shuddered through the space, rippling the floor beneath them. The child’s image landed on its side, skidding a few feet before its neck and one shoulder twisted against the nearest stack of boxes. The back of the Rachael child’s head snapped against the container, hard enough to daze her, her eyelids fluttering at the point of losing consciousness.
Sarah came close to falling, staying upright only by catching and bracing herself against the wall. The vibration of another impact travelled through her flesh and into the center of her bones. For a moment, the thought came to her that the Salander 3 might be shaken apart, seams tearing loose from one another, letting the Flow’s icy waters come pouring in. Even if she could make her way back to where she’d entered the ship, it might do no good; a picture flashed through her mind of the shaft from the water’s surface having been snapped loose from the sunken hull, drifting out of her reach. Wycliffe and Zwingli, bobbing around in their little boat, would look at each other through their square-rimmed glasses and know that something had gone wrong .
Silence, broken only by her own panting and the softer breath of the Rachael child, filled the corridor. Sarah’s stilled heartbeat was useless as a chronometer of perceived time; seconds or minutes, measured by the outside world, could have crawled by as she watched for whatever approached in the darkness before her.
Something touched her, though not her skin; she sensed the presence rather than felt it. Sarah looked down and saw that the flooring on which she stood had changed, become glistening and wet. She saw her face in a red mirror, a thin film of blood that had seeped out of the dark, a soft, inexorable tide that mired around her shoes. Nausea welled inside her as she stepped back from the pool, leaving two red footprints that the larger redness swallowed, one after another.
When another footstep sounded, just marring the corridor’s breathing silence, Sarah looked up. A hand, clenched into a white-knuckled fist, left its shadow on the glistening floor. A man’s fist, scarred and cut, as though breaking glass had chewed raw the skin over the bones. The small wounds oozed red, trickling one drop after another, or the same one over and over, that fell and broke the pooled blood into a rippled shimmer.
Sarah’s reflection shattered and recoalesced, as though there were no escape for it, either.
The fist struck the wall across from Sarah, hard enough to dent the metal around it, straining the welds on all four sides of the panel. But she heard nothing; the impact took place in silence, the air seemingly unable to carry any more shock waves to her ears. Or else—the random thought tumbled inside her skull-my hallucinations have a limit. They know how much I can take.
That limit, if there was one, shattered when the man’s image stepped forward from the darkness into the light. His face was still shadowed, as boots that were already bloodied up to the knees stepped into the thin puddle that reached to the point where Sarah had retreated.
She looked up into the man’s face. Saw him, and recognized him from the overlapping layers of her own memory, at its farthest recesses, and from images that weren’t memory but things on paper, scraps of the long-buried past. Sarah looked into the image’s eyes and saw her mirror reflection there, two bright points locked in darkness into which the flickering glow of the ship’s overhead panels could never extend; the reflections held fast, not scattering into fragments the way her face in the pool of blood had gone.
Thking another slow step backward, Sarah watched as the man stepped forward, as though his motion was locked to hers, inseparable. Her gaze was held as well; from both his face, that she saw even clearer now that he had come full underneath the overhead panel’s radiance, and her own doubled image. He took his fist away from the wall, its imprint left beneath a smear of red.
Something as bright and wet glistened on his face. She saw now the stripes of blood and torn flesh, three vertical, parallel rows on each side, just below his eyes; the wounds might have been from someone else’s nails, someone struggling futilely against the figure’s advance and the closing of his hands upon a throat and the breath within.
For a moment, the man’s brow creased, a flicker of puzzlement passing across his sight. His upraised fist opened, the fingers pulling from the blood at the center of his palm. “Who are you?” His voice was a harsh, grating sound, a part of him that had become unused to speech. “You can’t be, you’re already dead. I already took care of you .
You’re the one that’s dead—Sarah wanted to shout out the words, but her own voice wouldn’t move. She backed away from the figure—the man seemed to tower above her, his black hair scraping against the light panels so that he had to lower his head to the level of his shoulders to come any nearer.
Her heel caught on something behind her; she was barely able to keep from falling. Her hand caught on one of the stacked boxes as she looked over her shoulder. The Rachael child lay on the corridor’s flooring, back partway raised against one of the bottom crates. Her eyes drifted open, looking first up at Sarah, then widening in terror as she caught sight of the figure looming at the other end of the narrow space.
Sarah’s own will broke; the figure had come close enough that his red hand had started to reach for her, broad fingertips inches from the tangle of hair that had come loose and fallen across her neck. The face that looked back at her from the dark mirrors of his eyes had paled with the same fear that had wrapped around the child cringing behind her. If the image wasn’t real, it was real enough. Enough to kill, the voice inside Sarah whispered.