Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

At dawn, he was reading the book through for the second time, terrified by the parallel reality of its words. Only the ending was different, for it depicted Eve and Ken, the narrator, going off together blissfully into Timesend.

His eyes were red, tear-torn, and his whole body hollowed, a bubble of silence. He dropped the book and shuffled out of the apartment, needing air. He walked down Fifty-seventh Street to Central Park.

Madness is lonely, he thought at the edge of the pond, dawn spreading on the water like a tree of light.

The city of his mind was frenzied with the commerce of implications and ideas. "How could Zeke have known?"

was the question that enjambed "What is .real, anyway?" This was earthtwo. This was a place as alien as the Werld. Nothing was real. Everything was possible.

Not even Evoe's song was his in this place.

Madnesses mingled in him, and he may very well have lost all perspective then and there, but the wild shout that was gathering sound in him was interrupted by the slice of a sharply pitched whistle. It was the furious sound of his mind cracking. Until he recognized whaf it must be: The whistle was coiling from his left breast pocket.

He reached into his chamois jacket and withdrew the imp card in a hand that went cold with realization.

The sound was the warning tone, announcing that something sizable had come through his lynk to the Werld. He looked about him-but, of course, there was nothing Werldlike here: In his amazed stupor he had left his lance back at the apartment!

He sprinted across Fifty-ninth, caroming off brak-ing cars and bounding around pedestrians. Whatever it VMS, it was back at the suite.

Sheelagh was asleep, but the sound from where Carl had dropped his gear woke her. It was not a recognizable noise. It sounded like oil sizzling in a pan, only louder and with a crackle that was almost electrical.

Sheelagh had left her door open in case Carl wanted to be with her, and she could see Caitlin asleep in her open room. She got out of bed, and the noise crisped sharper. She didn't bother putting a robe over her negligee but went directly to Carl's room.

The hot noise was definitely fuming from there. She knocked, and the weird sound went on heedlessly.

"Carl?" The door was unlocked. She nudged it open and saw nothing through the crack. She opened the door wide and only then saw what was making the racket.

The wall above Carl's empty bed was brown with the thick shape of a giant bug. The huge trilobite shimmered with the vibrations of its complex mouthparts and antennae.

Sheelagh screamed, and the thing scuttled off thewall and onto the bed. Its broad, flat body covered the whole quilt, its many thorn-spurred legs quivering with the insanity of its gnarled perceptions.

Sheelagh's scream woke Caitlin, and she popped out of her room in time to see the insectile head emerge from Carl's room.

Sheelagh had backed into the living room on nightmare-vague legs and was trying to scream again, but her breath refused to work.

The monster crawled out of the bedroom, its hissing cry sirening louder.

In her desperation to get away, Sheelagh tumbled over an ottoman, and the thing hulked toward her. Caitlin mastered her terror and heaved a glass ashtray at it. The ashtray bounced off the calcareous plate of the creature's back, and it reared.

Sheelagh scrambled away from the beast and was clawing at the drapes to pull herself upright,. the gro

tesque eyestalks of the startled beast brushing her back, when Carl banged into the apartment.

He shouldered past Caitlin and rushed into his bedroom. The next moment, he came out with a gold rod in his hand. A sight-searing bolt of lightning lashed out of the rod and struck the knot of the monster's head. The beast's death-thrash was lost in the retinal glare.

Moments later, when Sheelagh could see again, she found herself spraddled beside the stiff upended body of the thing.

Firecrackers were bursting in her muscles, and her mind jumped in and. out of herself in a tantrum of horror.

Carl touched her with the lance, and she calmed instantly.

"What's going on here?" she asked, her amazement expanding in her like light through the void. Her calm seemed permanent as the heavens, and she examined the dead thing without fear.

"Devil son of Lucifer!" Caitlin shouted.

Sheelagh got to her feet in time to keep her mother from clawing at Carl.

Carl swung his lance around and touched the old woman.

Caitlin's scowl unlocked, and she seemed to shrink as she settled back on her weight. "What have you done to me?" she puzzled. The flare of her animosity was like an evening color, an apricot dusk shriveling into the horizon.

"Wait for me in another room," he said to them. "I have to dispose of this thing, and I don't want you exposed to the radiation."

The two women retreated, his armor came on, and he used an inertial pulse to scatter the corpse's atoms. In a fraction of visible time, half of it vanished; the rest jumped with the impact, and the. next pulse finished it. No trace remained.

Carl found Caitlin and Sheelagh in the kitchen. Sheelagh was making tea, and her mother was sitting in the breakfast nook. They regarded him charily when he entered.

The lance hummed inaudibly in his hand. "So I lied." He sat on a stool and laid his lance on the counter beside him. He told them most everything.

They listened quietly, sipping their tea, accepting what he said. When he was done twenty minutes later, their eyes were bruised with sleep. The lance was drowsing them. They went back to their beds without responding to him.

He showered, letting his anxiety drain away, dressed in a three-piece dark-blue pinstripe suit, took his lance, and left the apartment.

Carl arrived at the bucolic Cornelius Psychiatric Hostel in a limousine. The lance inside his left sleeve was cool, almost cold, against the flesh between his wrist and elbow. He put his gray aviator glasses on and adjusted his tie by the reflection from the glass partition that separated him from the driver.

The car waited for him under the ivied porte cochere while he went in.

The day receptionist was just setting up in the wake of the nightshift, and she didn't look up at him.

"I'm here to see Zeke Zhdarnov."

"Visiting hours begin at ten," the husky woman said, not taking her spectacled eyes off her work. "You're two hours early"

"Perhaps this will explain," Carl said, showing her the imp card.

She glanced at it wearily. "What's a blank card supposed to explain?"

Carl's smug look evaporated. He tucked the card back in his breast pocket, tossed his eyebrows in a

carefree expression, and walked past the receptionist toward the wide double doors with the wire-mesh-glass windows. If she didn't see anything on the card, he figured it was because she didn't have to.

"You can't go through there," she called after him.

"Those doors are locked.

The lance tucked up his sleeve hummed. A spark snapped in the lock, and the doors swung open at his touch.

The corridor led through chromed examining chambers, which were empty, to a diagnostic room appointed with fluorescent X-ray reviewers on the wall, anatomical charts, a model of the brain, and a green chalkboard. On the board this was written in a strong, clarified hand: "`First find where the darkness lies. Opposite that stands a great light."

Beyond the chalkboard were three adjacent doors. Carl sensed with certitude which of the three led toward Zeke.

"Can I help you?" A short, whitehaired man with the seamed face of a shrunken apple and alert green eyes stood behind Carl. An orderly with a hulking frame accompanied him. "I am Dr. Blau, the chief of staff"

"Please,, do." Carl faced him and presented the white card.