Within the huge structure, the air was cool, moist and somewhat misty. He had halfway expected to see corridors and machines at work once he had penetrated the hemisphere, but upon stepping out of the central core shaft, all he could see was mist and low green shrubbery.
Bushes? Trees
? He thought immediately of Perry Eventide's man-made world, those prairies and forests inside the rotating cylinder in space. But here, there was no apparent source of illumination, for certainly it didn't come from the outside as it did for Eventide's spacebound haven. This was the English moor. Low bushes, short stubby trees, and clover or a soft, green grass lay underfoot. Close by, he could hear the sound of a small creek tumbling over stones.
Considering the sudden change of landscape, considering how it fitted the music in a haunting sort of way, he realized that this pleasant environment completely negated the fact that beyond the walls of the hemisphere was a raging Hell. And at no time did he feel as if he were suspended high over the fiery ocean. Walking away from the core shaft and losing himself to the fog, he could have been anywhere in the English highlands. He removed the filter-mask.
Yet, despite the fact that he couldn't immediately discern the presence of any kind of threat—and perhaps he left it behind him on the islands of the flaming ocean below—he did feel like an intruder.
He pulled out the Malachi and set it on single-shot.
He began walking in a slow spiral outward from the central shaft. The fog was so thick that he couldn't see more than several meters ahead or above him.
This was a place, he thought to himself, where Druids would be lurking around their stone monoliths, holding mysterious rites at dawn. No Greek satyrs and nymphs belonged here; it was too Celtic. There was something identifiably somber about the inside of this particular hemisphere. It occurred to him that if a person were born into one of these worlds, he might not know what was on the outside, if indeed he came to discover that there was an outside. If that were the case. then this world might be perfect. A
perfect prison
, he realized.
He came across a stream, somewhat shallow, with small, precisely rounded cobbles. Tiny water-plants sprouted along the sides of the creek, and a turtle the size of a man's fist lounged happily in the reeds. The turf sloped delicately into the creek, and he decided to follow the stream.
He stepped over the creek with the help of a few nicely placed boulders, and suddenly found himself in sight of Ellie Estevan. The music, he realized, had reached a high point. But she hadn't yet seen him.
She was crouching over the stream, dressed in a loose-fitting white saffron cloak and gown. She was drawing a stick through the mud beside the creek, very much lost in a state of profound melancholy.
He holstered the Malachi.
"Ellie," he called, approaching her calmly, wondering if abandoning the priest's collar was a mistake. She was very deeply in the Syndrome.
She looked up at him vacantly. She didn't recognize him at all. He feared that he might frighten her.
"Ellie," he began. "It's me. Francis Lanier. Are you all right?"
She seemed catatonic, confused.
Lanier watched her closely. In her amnesia, she seemed like a different person entirely. Fog drifted around them.
But as soon as he had spoken, something seemed to alter the texture of the world in just the same way that reasoning or speaking in a dream sometimes distorts the dream. He couldn't quite place the feeling, but it reinforced his notion of being an intruder, This was Ellie Estevan's world, not his. He could feel it.
She had forgotten everything. A glazed look spread across her face. Lanier noticed that her hair seemed longer, almost reddish. And she appeared to be much thinner. The folds of her cloak made it hard for him to tell any more of her appearance. She had changed physically as well as emotionally. She was so absorbed by the Syndrome that she had lost all recognition of the world she left behind, nor could she grasp exactly where she was in
this
world.
"Ellie," he started. "I've come to take you home. Everything's going to be all right." He spoke softly, almost as if he were about to utter the words of a fairy tale to a little girl. Ellie turned around, staring at him.
"Do you remember me?" he asked, approaching her. "Do you recall how you got here?"
She rose, slowly, like a ghostly column of smoke.
Like an angel
, he thought.
Beautiful, detached, frozen by death and despair
. And it suddenly came to him that this just might be someone else's perverse idea of Heaven and Hell, and not hers. But it was a mechanism that he didn't fully comprehend. He was no psychoanalyst.
She spoke to him, distantly. "These are my sins." She held out the empty palms of her hands. She was crying.
Not her voice
, he thought. She spoke as if hypnotized, but he couldn't escape the look of genuine despair and sorrow on her face.
She's in very deep
. "Ellie …" he coaxed.
He knew that he could grab her and wrestle her down, giving her a shot of Baktropol, and be done with the whole affair. But he also knew from experience that the transition back into the real world was often quite violent. Emotional damage could ensue. He decided to talk her down as best he could.
"Ellie, where are we?"
She didn't move from where she stood. She was like a monument to the dead.
"This is the waiting," she murmured. Her eyes no longer sparkled as he remembered them. It was as if she had already committed herself to the dead. He could sense it in the strains of the music.
"We don't have to wait any longer," he said gently. "We can go back home any time you want. Back to your friends."
She looked at him with her eyes wide, swollen with tears. She opened her mouth, stuttering a cry. "I have no friends. I've killed them all."
He reached into his medicine pouch and pulled out a small bottle. He shook out two tiny pale blue pills. Baktropol.
"Ellie," he started. "It's time to go now. Can you take these for me?"
Automatically, she fingered the two little pills from his outstretched hand. She looked at them as if she didn't understand what they were. It was as if she hadn't seen a pill in her life.
"Go ahead," he said. "Swallow them. They're for you."
She motioned to do so, but just as she did, the earth shuddered. Not shuddered, exactly,
but swelled
, like a ship on an ocean's wave.
The only real earthquake that Lanier had ever been in was one several years ago that had struck Los Angeles. But this was nothing like that quake, nor the rendings of the world that Perry Eventide had manifested. The hemisphere, and the English countryside, tilted horribly, rolling.
The two of them were thrown off balance. The water in the creek leaped up and splashed them, no longer confined to the creekbed. The hemisphere righted itself, or tried to. They fell over like toys.
Then a voice bellowed out through the mist.
"Ellie. Ellie, you are mine. Now and always." It wasn't imploring, or urgent. It was sinisterly confident and demanding. Lanier couldn't identify the voice. It could have been a man's voice or a woman's. The mist and the trees dispersed sound. It came from all around them.
Ellie screamed, sliding into the creek.
Lanier rolled over, grabbing an exposed tree root for support until the ground stopped wobbling. Ellie Estevan twisted across the turf, covered with mud, then rolled with the gyrations of the earth over a small rise, and fell out of sight.
Lanier sat up when the pitch and yaw began to even itself out. The water in the creek trickled back from its unknown source.
He jumped up, leaping the creek, and rushed over the rise.
"Ellie!" he yelled after her. She was running down the opposite side of the small hill, out across the grass into the dense swirling fog.
"Ellie! Stop!" Grimly, he yanked out his Malachi.
Let's do it right this time
.
The other voice boomed overhead.
"Ellie, it's time. Come to me."
The voice was vaguely familiar to him but he wasn't quite sure. He ran after her. The ground still seesawed somewhat, so his shot had to be accurate.
He ran through a thicket of scrub oak and juniper, trying to catch up with her. Thirty meters would do. Beyond that, the Malachi was highly inaccurate.
He stopped and sighted her along the barrel of the Malachi, then fired off a few shots. Tufts of grass ripped up in the spray of the tiny anesthetic needles. He had missed.
She kept on running.
The voice cried, "Ellie … Ellie."
Lanier looked around. It was impossible to tell if the voice was created in the hemisphere itself or if it originated within the context of the music.
Suddenly he came to the inside of the hemisphere wall. He should have known that they couldn't run too far unless they ran in circles. This world did have its limits.
She stood alone, facing him, breathing hard, and she was very frightened.
With the nearness of the wall to them, Lanier sensed the utter artificiality of the world inside this hemisphere. Even the grass beneath their feet seemed thin and pale.
He breathed hard himself, but for different reasons.
He walked over to her, carefully.
"No!" She held out a hand, begging him to stop. "You have nothing to do with this! Leave, now! Please! All the time is up!"
She seemed oddly, and suddenly, lucid to him now.
"Your time …" said the voice out of the fog.
Lanier spun around, Malachi ready, but no one was there. The wall of the hemisphere made the voice seem quite close.
"Listen. Ellie," he began. "Your time isn't up. We can go home now…" The Malachi's handle grew moist in his palm. He hesitated.
"No," the voice asserted. A man's voice. He knew it for sure, now that he could hear it off the solid wall a few meters away. It came from somewhere above them.
"Her home," it continued, "is below. With the damned."
"
What?
" Lanier looked around. The presence of a third person was very strong, but he couldn't see anyone.
Ellie went pale, her hands to her mouth.
Lanier raised the Malachi, thumbing it onto single-shot. He took aim.
Just as he lifted the rapid-fire pistol, Ellie gasped and seemed to jump a bit in the air from the ground. Then she dropped. A huge piece of the hemisphere in the shape of a hexagon fell out from underneath her.
She dropped from the hemisphere.
"No!" Lanier cried, diving forward, sliding onto his chest in the grass. He grasped the lip of the hexagonal hole.
The heat struck him savagely in the face. Ellie fell, violently twisting like a rag doll as she plummeted three hundred meters into the burning ocean below. She screamed all the way down.
The hemisphere drifted beyond the bursting flames that had engulfed her. Heaven and Hell. One above the other.
Lanier, wretched with grief, pulled himself back. The entire floor of the floating hemisphere was—had to be—laced with hexagonal trapdoors. But it didn't matter now.
He knew that he should have shot her. He had waited too long; had underestimated the danger.
He sat up, unmoving.
Like the others
, he thought.
Gone like the others
. He rolled over and slowly got to his feet. The voice overhead was gone, and the fog had gotten thicker, the air somewhat cooler.
Yet the world remained.
"Who are you!" he screamed above the fog.
There was no answer. There was only stillness and fog. He stumbled across the grass and fell to his knees.
Chapter Eleven
New England Triptych
William Schuman
"Wow, it smells like brimstone in here!" Charlie Gilbert proclaimed, removing his raincoat and setting it on the back of a handy chair. His thick red hair, matted with rainwater, gave him the eager look of a mischievous boy, full of pranks.
Francis Lanier, still in his work tunic, still wrapped in his wide utility belt, its holster empty of the abandoned Malachi, sat on the Naugahyde couch with a dour look on his face. Though the air inside the ranch house was relatively cool, Lanier himself sweated unmercifully, his clothing blackened and stained in several spots.
Christy sat across from him. She held a file folder in her hands.
"Hey," Charlie broke in. "Where'd all the dark skies come from, anyway?" He tossed a pouch bulging with papers onto the coffee table.
Lanier looked at his friend.
"I lost Ellie Estevan. She's dead."
Christy had prepared a cup of darjeeling tea upon is arrival. Lanier cradled it on his lap.
"You're joking," Charlie said. "No, I guess you're not." He sat down next to Christy. "What happen? You just got back?"
Lanier slowly explained the circumstances surrounding the attempted rescue, and everything that led up to her death, going into great detail over the flaming ocean and the hemispheres that floated above it. Christy had already recorded his narrative for the report she would compile later that night.
Charlie was horrified. "That's terrible," he whispered. "But whose voice was that speaking to her? Did you recognize it?"
"I don't know whose voice it was," Lanier reflected, "but I thought it sounded familiar."
"A man's voice," Charlie said.
"As far as I could tell. It might have been her subconscious, for all I know." He shook his head.
Christy faced Charlie. "One other thing happened."
"Fran was gone for six hours." This time she was very worried.
Charlie looked across to Lanier. "Is that true? I've been busy all day. I thought you'd gone and come back long ago." He paused, somewhat confused. "But why that long? Surely the music wasn't that long in duration."
"No, it wasn't," Lanier said. "I wasn't gone for six hours
my
time. The whole affair couldn't have lasted more than an hour. I did linger there a while longer, after she fell, but not much. Not six hours."