Marc Zicree - Angelfire

Oh, this was just too damn convenient.

Doc caught my arm and turned me around to face him. He raised a hand to the torn front of my shirt, fingering the stained denim. “Is this blood?”

“It’s nothing, really.”

He pushed the fabric aside to bare the welts Clay had left. “These are claw marks. What in the name of God is in that place?”

“Nothing a can of mace wouldn’t cure. It’s fine, really. I just had a disagreement with somebody over my … charms.” Yeah, and I said it with a straight face, too.

Behind me Howard made a snuffling noise that sounded an awful lot like laughter.

I turned on him. “You got a problem?”

He shook his head.

“Good. Weapons?”

He just grinned at me, baring a mouthful of incredibly sharp teeth. Would’ve done a T-Rex proud.

“How about you?” I asked Doc.

In answer, he reached up under his jacket and pulled out his knife. It was about six inches long-a very effective weapon in the right hands.

“That’ll do,” I told him. “But only if you’re prepared to use it.”

The look he gave me was grim. “I am prepared.”

Yeah, but for what? I could’ve shared my certainty that we were stepping into a trap, that there were too many open doors in this place. I didn’t. What good would it have done? Instead I said, “Back at the Preserve … I wish I’d realized … I just wish there were more time.”

He smiled. “There is always time,” he said, then turned and walked into the darkness of the seventh floor.

God, let him be right , I thought, and stepped through after him.

DOC

We were smothered in cold, clammy darkness the mo-ment we entered the building, and made our way along a corridor that seemed to go forever up its north side. When at last we turned into the transverse hallway and the carpet ended, our footsteps made scrapes and whispers on the marble sheathing. Amplified and echoed by the escalator galleries, it seemed as if an army trod the halls. This was not such a bad thing, I reasoned. At least we should be able to hear as well as we were heard.

We turned from the escalators into a broad hallway that glowed with eerie green light and whose walls seemed to run wet with liquid. Colleen slid her crossbow out of its harness and set a bolt. I put a hand out to stay her.

“Don’t worry,” she said, her eyes probing the shadows between the tiny rivers of green light. “I’ll make damn sure what I’m shooting at before I empty this thing.” She turned her head toward me, green luminance washing across her face and into her eyes. “It looks like a haunted house. You ever been in a haunted house, Doc? Besides the Wishart place, I mean.”

“No. Never. I have been in field hospitals, though, in Afghanistan. When there was bombing, they would extinguish all the lights, and it would be this dark and this silent between explosions. It smelled like this. Like decay.”

“Cheery thought. We’re gonna have to work on that attitude, Viktor.”

I should not want to smile. Not here. “Thank you,” I said. “De nada.”

“I been in haunted houses,” Howard said. “Holy Family put on a good one at Halloween. Used to like ’em.”

Colleen let out a crack of laughter that echoed off the living walls. “The Holy Family put on a haunted house?”

Howard blinked at her, eyes like pale marbles in the wash of sickly light. “The church -over on Roosevelt.”

I found I could not tear my eyes from the strange green capillaries. They reminded me of blood vessels. A network of veins beneath the skin of …

Colleen was right. I needed to work on my attitude.

We went down the broad, bleeding hallway, Colleen at point, me slightly behind, Howard watching our backs. I could not say I was entirely comfortable with him there.

We had not gone far when we began to see vague patches of radiance moving behind the walls. As we worked our way down the hall, turning this way and that, they began to take recognizable form, as if each turn peeled away an obscuring layer of film. Flares-dozens of them-floated somehow behind these glazed walls like bright fish in an aquarium.

“What is this?” Colleen’s voice oozed out in a whisper. “Some kind of giant stasis chamber? Cryogen- Cryo- Oh, hell, you know what I mean.”

“Cryonics,” I said. “And no, if it were something like that, it would no longer be working. This is not science, Colleen. This is something else.”

She moved to stand next to one of the glistening walls, staring up at the bright, blurred figures. “It’s like an aquarium.”

Like. Like an aquarium, like a stasis chamber, like a haunted house. It was like nothing we’d ever seen or even imagined, but still we tried to tell ourselves that it was. In this way we fooled ourselves into thinking we could grasp it, could deal with it. To do otherwise would have been a form of surrender.

We turned as the walls willed, and I came to think that perhaps they moved with us, changing shape to guide us deeper into the labyrinth. I was hopelessly turned about by the time we heard other voices somewhere in the maze. We couldn’t make out what they said, but they were raised in high emotion and punctuated by the ring of metal against stone.

“That’s Cal,” Colleen said, and picked up her pace.

Without warning we emerged into a square chamber twice the size of Cal’s entire Manhattan apartment. Cal and Goldie were there, faced off against each other like boxers. Cal had drawn his sword; Goldie gestured emphatically at the wall. Enid and Magritte were nowhere in sight.

“You’re wasting time, Cal,” Goldie was saying. “This is a dead end.”

“No. This is the way, dammit! There was a doorway here-I saw it. It closed up. We’re being intentionally blocked. They’ve given us one way out-back the way we came. I intend to go this way!”

He wielded the sword, and for an instant I thought he meant to use it on Goldie. But instead he swung it at the wall, connecting with a sound like the ringing of a bell. Sparks flew, the room seemed to shudder, thunder rolled around us.

I froze, struck with the impossible idea that the building was a living thing and that Cal had wounded it. Colleen shouted and vaulted across the chamber, Howard and I strung out behind.

Relief flooded Cal’s face at the sight of her. “Colleen- thank God-”

“What’re you doing ?” she asked, gaze darting into the dark corners of the chamber. “Where’re Magritte and Enid?”

Cal stared at her, seemingly stunned. “I’m trying to get to Tina.” He pointed up at the wall, his eyes bright and sharp, his face gaunt in the play of light and shadow. A flare drifted there behind the dark, translucent surface-hair and clothing wafting as if in a breeze.

Colleen and I both stared up at her. Her long hair was the color of moon on wheat; large azure smudges marked her eyes; her skin had the sheen of sunlight through milk glass. She was a watercolor, no feature distinct enough to recognize.

Colleen grasped Cal’s arm. “Where are Magritte and Enid?” she repeated. “They were with Doc. They got up here before we did. They should be here.”

“Magritte is fine,” said Goldie absently. “She’s nearby. I can feel her.”

His lack of concern raised a chill in my breast. “Goldie, are you sure?” I asked. “Do you trust what you feel in this place?”

The look he gave me I have seen often in the eyes of men who wake to find themselves paralyzed. “I think maybe I’m a little fucked up right now. Hard to tell.”

“But why aren’t they here ?” asked Colleen.