A smile touched her lips. It was “In Your Eyes,” by Peter Gabriel, from the movie Say Anything. God, how she loved that film.
Bracing herself, setting her grip in the handholds she’d made in the wall, she lifted her bare foot and pressed her toes against the wall. It slid through the sand as though the toehold had been there all along, just waiting for her. But that wasn’t true. She had investigated every inch of this prison.
Somehow she was doing this herself.
The Vittora hummed more loudly and drifted toward her. Fear tingled at the base of her spine and Collette started to climb as though she might outrun it. Where she thrust her hands and feet at the wall, the sand formed handholds for her to grip. Inch by inch, she scaled the wall as the Vittora danced around her, humming growing louder with each new grip.
It darted across the circular chamber, paused, and then zipped toward her.
Collette tried to cry out, but could not find her voice. The Vittora struck her back and she nearly lost her grip and fell fifteen feet to the bottom of the chamber. But somehow she managed to hold on as the Vittora seared her flesh for a moment…
And then was gone. Its light winked out, its voice vanished.
For several seconds she hung there on the wall, and then Collette realized what had happened. The Vittora had not vanished. It had simply returned to the place from which it had come…inside of her. Her luck had come back to her, and it seemed her doom was not so imminent as she had believed.
A small voice in the back of her mind wanted to know how any of this was possible, but she existed now in a world of impossible things. Stopping the Sandman, getting out of this hellhole, saving those children and her brother…those were the things that mattered.
There were secrets here. Secrets that involved her and Oliver. Collette knew that. But secrets could wait.
With the Vittora back inside her, she felt invigorated. Her pajamas were torn and filthy, her hair matted, her skin like leather from the sun, but she climbed swiftly.
When Collette pulled herself through one of those high arched windows, she had a smile on her face. She dragged her belly and breasts on the rough sand of the window ledge and then stood up, turned, and spat down into the chamber that had been her prison.
Then she glanced around. The view from the ledge that surrounded the cell at the level of those windows was a breathtaking panorama, with the soft white sand of a magnificent beach on one side and what seemed like jungle on the other. The building around her was a castle. No other word could have described it.
A sand castle, on the shore of some tropical land. How it was that, throughout her captivity, she had never once heard or caught scent of the ocean, she did not know. Another secret yet to be exposed.
Collette looked around and found a set of stairs that led downward, into the castle. They were the only possible way down. A jump from this height would surely kill her. Exhilaration and fear raged through her, and her skin prickled with anticipation as she started down the stairs.
All the walls of the castle were constructed from the same hard sand as her prison, and she wondered if she could shape them as well. The corridors were dark, save for torches set in sconces on the wall at long intervals, so at times she walked through nearly complete darkness.
There were many doors in the castle. Many stairwells.
On one of the stairwells, the view froze her in place. It revealed a sprawl of sand and a broad, well-traveled road that ran through a lovely landscape of oak and rowan trees, with mountains in the far distance.
Whatever land that was, it existed far from the place she had seen from the castle’s pinnacle.
For long minutes, she kept on searching for some way out of this endless labyrinth of halls and stairs, passing through great chambers and eventually through quiet, empty rooms. Only the wind moved here, scouring the sand that created every surface.
At last, when she could stand it not a moment longer, she turned to the nearest wall and began to dig. The sand gave way, spilling all around her, and soon her hands burst through to another chamber beyond the wall. Collette paused and used her fingers to carve into the sand an outline of a door.
She pushed, and all of the sand within that outline collapsed on the floor.
Collette stepped through, into a chamber whose ceiling rose up and up like the greatest of cathedrals. All around the edges of the vast room were doors set into the outer walls. And at one end there stood a pair of enormous, wooden doors, large enough for a parade of elephants.
The doors stood closed, but she felt sure this was the exit and started in that direction.
Elsewhere in the cathedral room she heard a shrill cry, followed by sobbing. The whimpering of a child.
No, she thought. Not again.
Escape called to her. But the whimpering continued and she could not simply walk away from that sound.
It took her a minute or two to locate the source of the child’s cries. Collette strode toward the door-a real door, it seemed, not something carved of sand-but as she did she glanced around. Her skin itched as though grains of sand were sliding over her flesh. A point at the center of her back felt warm and she searched the shadows all through that huge chamber, certain she was being observed.
“In your eyes,” she sang softly, “the light, the heat. In your eyes, I am complete…”
It comforted her, like whistling in the dark, though she was hardly aware she was doing it.
Something glittered in the center of the room, in the dark. Careful not to step on it, she bent to pick up a piece of what she thought was broken glass. Yet it didn’t seem like ordinary glass. More like crystal. Or diamond.
Another cry came from beyond that door and she tossed the glass down. The child needed her. She rushed now, certain that she had the right door. If she was being observed there was precious little she could do about it.
At the door she paused, hand on the knob, took a deep breath, and then turned, hauling it open.
On the other side stood a little girl with blond hair, hands covering her eyes as she sobbed, muttering words that might have been prayers. The dress she wore seemed familiar, much like something Collette herself had owned as a little girl, with all the bows and trim that her mother had loved.
The girl stood in shadows in a short corridor like the others in the castle, all sand and darkness, all color washed away. Beyond her stood another door, hanging open, the edges of it spilling sand. Through the open door Collette could see a child’s bedroom.
Her heart trembled at the scene, so like what she had stumbled upon before. But in this room were bunk beds, and in each bed there slept a small boy, twins from the look of them. Posters covered the walls. Books and video games covered the floor as if a tornado had struck.
The last time she had come upon a scene like this, the child had already been dead, murdered by the Sandman. But these boys still slept, untroubled, unharmed.
The sound of weeping grew louder.
The boys stirred in their bunks.
Collette put her hand against the wall to steady herself, one door behind her and another ahead. If the bedroom belonged to the boys, then who was-
The little girl, crying out in despair, lowered her hands and looked up. Collette gasped and staggered back a step. The girl was herself, a mirror image of Collette at five years old.
But her eyes had been torn out.
The girl’s cries turned to laughter as she began to change. Only then, in the shadows, did Collette see that she was not a flesh-and-blood thing but a construct of sand. The sand shifted and twisted and built itself up, a cloak draping around it.