Tad Williams: The Dirty Streets of Heaven

“Yeah. But I don’t know if there’s any water in them.”

“Then start praying.” I darted down a narrow alley full of broken, rusted chairs and bits of fallen masonry that the bay air had spent busy years covering in mold. I ran as fast as I could manage for the Kingsport Plunge, the abandoned swimming complex where flappers and their straw-hatted swains had once come to sun and swim beside the bay. We emerged from the shelter of the ruined buildings, and the moon dripped enough light for us to make our way between the long-abandoned spa pools, just so many empty cups now with scummy water and debris littering their bottoms like tea leaves waiting to be read. A few more steps and I could make out the shadowy lip of the outdoor pool, a concrete pit the size of a football field. Once diving towers, lifeguard stations, and refreshment stands had stood around it like Renaissance towns around a lake, but time and weather had swept them all away. Now only the outdoor Plunge itself remained, a Bauhaus Grand Canyon made of cement, but as we reached the side I could see that there was nothing in the bottom of it but a foot and a half of rainwater and a graveyard of rusted poolside recliners.

Well, that was just wonderful. Maybe the ghallu would step on something nasty while it was eating us and get tetanus.

“The indoor pools,” Sam panted. “If you want water, I think they’re still fed from the bay. Maybe someone left the sluices open.”

Just then I heard a sound like bombs going off and turned. The monster had climbed onto one of the shops behind us, smashing the remnants of its roof as it scrambled toward the edge. It saw us then and leaped down as quickly as a cat (if cats came in combine-harvester size) then began to close the ground between us, leaping over the cement pits of the empty therapy pools.

Nobody had bothered to put a lock on the indoor pool, and we slammed through the door and into the echoing space. The reason it was open quickly became apparent. It might have been an indoor pool once, but the roof had been made of something less permanent than the walls and had long since rotted away. The ceiling was nothing but a basket of rusted metal spars, completely open to the sky, but even so the place still stank of urine and human feces and rotting dead things.

Even as we ran across the slippery tiles, I saw that for once Fate had smiled on me, or at least not simply flipped me the bird: as Sam had guessed, there was water in the indoor pool, gleaming darkly where the moon touched it through the tangle of rusted struts. In fact, the pool was nearly full.

But the moon wasn’t the only thing above us. A large shadow appeared at the edge of the roof and sprang down, less like a cat or a toad this time than like something with lots of legs dropping onto its prey. It crouched in the shadows, temporarily shapeless, but I could see the burning eyes, and it could just as obviously see me.

Then Sam slipped and fell, cracking his head hard against the floor, and before I could slide to a stop, struggling to keep my balance on the filthy, muddy tiles, I was a dozen feet past him. Sam lay on the ground, not moving. The ghallu came toward us with horns down and arms spread. I wasn’t sure how many shells I might have left in my gun-two, maybe three if I was lucky-but I stepped toward the thing.

“Hey, you- ugly!” I shouted. “You don’t want him, you want me!”

It actually stopped, tipping its wide-pronged head like a dog.

“Come on and try me, you ancient bastard! Come and taste the twenty-first century!”

It sprang over Sam as if it had meant to do that in the first place. Something that big should never be that fast- never . I realized it was going to be on me before I could even get traction again, so I fired. With no time for careful placement I just aimed for the shadowy center of it and pulled the trigger, then squeezed off another for good measure. I saw both bullets hit and the thing shuddered as the silver pierced it, slowing its loping progress to a stumble. Sprays of molten orange leaped like sunspots from its torso, but the bullets didn’t kill it any more than meteors would kill the sun. All that those shots did for me was allow me time to get my feet under me again, so I could scramble toward the dark indoor plunge and leap in.

Sam had been right about another thing: the pool was full of salt water from the bay-but that wasn’t all. Left open to the elements and only the Highest could guess what other kind of filth, the water smelled like sewage and clung like oil. Floating branches and other debris tangled my arms as I swam. I wasted no time on the aesthetics, but paddled as fast as I could to the deep end where the chipped tiles still faintly read “12”-twelve feet, I hoped, not “Lane 12” or something equally useless. When I got there I turned, treading water, trying to keep my gun out of the muck, and waited.

I didn’t wait long. Growling and rumbling, the huge thing scrabbled along the side of the pool for a moment as if gauging whether it could reach me from there, then leaped into the murky water. A geyser of steam vomited into the air.

It was fast in the water, too. It came toward me like a shark, just a dark bulge beneath the water’s surface. To my horror, I learned that simply because something hates water doesn’t mean it can’t swim. Instead of staying and waiting for it, I dove down and felt the creature pass just above me in a wave of scalding heat and furiously bubbling froth, its flames doused but its skin still hot as a branding iron.

The ghallu turned then and dug back toward me, too far up for me to slip past it to the surface. I did my best to ignore the foul water burning my eyes as I tried to kick out of the monster’s way, but I wasn’t fast enough and a moment later it was right over me.

I am no Olympic swimmer. My superiors gave me a good body, but not Superman’s. The ghallu had speed and strength far beyond any human frame, even one on loan to an angel. As I tried to dart away again it reached out and caught me-I could feel the skin of my ankle blistering. I did my best to turn and shoot at it, hoping I had one round left and that the Five-Seven would fire underwater, but some garbage floating in the pool had tangled itself with my trigger finger, and before I could get it untangled the monster yanked me toward it and dragged me upward.

It was dangling me upside down by one leg as it surfaced and thrashed its way toward the shallower end where it could stand up. The demon-beast’s skin was black, smooth as a dolphin’s, and smelled like melting rubber and sulfur. Even soaking wet the thing was painfully hot, and as it stood there dripping, up to its belly in the water, little flames began to run along its head and shoulders as the remaining moisture steamed away. I fought with my remaining strength but couldn’t wriggle loose. The pain of my ankle was so intense that I could only pray that there really was one bullet left so I could put it into my own skull and end the agony. The ghallu had dived into a full pool and swallowed a pound of silver and still barely broke stride. I had nothing else to try.

Helpless. That’s the word.

But instead of ripping my head off or burning me to ashes, the ghallu lifted me up and began to open its mouth, which kept opening and opening until it was a gaping hole, its distended lower jaw almost touching its chest. This time, instead of flames, I saw nothing inside it- nothing. Not the emptiness of an open gullet, but the void itself, belching out empty, freezing cold despite the heat of the ghallu ’s body, a bottomless pit stinking of oblivion. And then I realized that this demon wasn’t going to carry me back to Eligor, it was going to send me back. It was going to swallow me right down that horrible throat into Hell.