feet at the bottom. Down there, some three hundred feet
below, a soft blue light glowed. It seemed to be the gentle
blue of shallow water, but even this slight color branded
my eyes in contrast to the sameness of the terrain I had
been struggling across for some minutes.
I called down, listened to the flat echo, but received no
answer. If this was the place where Child waited, bound
by his own insanity, circled by unnamed demons, he was
unable to speak.
I swung over the jagged edge, looked to the bottom,
then grew wings like those I had seen on the batlike
creatures of the mountain. I descended gently, pulled the
wings in and absorbed them as the way grew too narrow
to glide. I dropped the last few feet onto the blue floor,
found it was made of ice.
To the right, the rock wall cut off three feet above the
ice, and the passage this created seemed to go on for some
distance. Lying on my stomach, I slid along the shimmering
ice; I was cold but not uncomfortable, exhilarated by the
freshness of the air here. A hundred feet further on, the
ceiling of black rock thrust suddenly upward, and I found
myself in a full-sized cavern where I could stand.
On my feet again, I crossed the barren room to the far
side where the ice-encrusted rock seemed to warp down-
ward. There, I discovered steps roughly chiseled in the ice.
I went down them, cautiously, eventually came out in a
shadowy chamber with another blue floor, though this one
was not empty: Child sat in the center of it in an ana-
logue version of his real body.
And…
And: the things crawled around him, circling in mind-
lessness, yet with a certain uncompromising evil that terri-
fied me even though I knew they could not do me any
physical harm. They were much like scorpions though
somewhat longer than a man’s arm, with flared, knife-
edged carapaces shielding their backs, and twenty spindly
legs on either side. Their stinging tails forked at the end,
each of the two prongs tipped with a trio of wicked spurs
as long as my little finger and tapered to needle points.
They did riot look at me, nor did their sensory cilia, burst-
ing like whiskers around their beaked mouths, in any way
indicate that they realized my presence.
Their legs hissed on the ice, and their constant parade
had worn shallow grooves in the cold floor.
There were different numbers of them at different mo-
ments. Now there might be as few as a dozen describing
the wide circle—now a hundred of them, magically crys-
tallizing out of the crisp air—now thirty, now a dozen,
now two dozen. No matter how hard I looked, I could not
catch one of them appearing or disappearing, though their
numbers fluctuated with every passing second. I had the
feeling that I was in a funhouse where there was a compli-
cated array of trick mirrors and that there was actually but
one of these creatures whose presence was magnified to one
degree or another by ingenious, mirrored pyrotechnics.
“Child?” I called.
The withered dwarf paid no attention to me, but stared
with morbid fascination at the nightmarish scorpion
guards which kept him ringed in and obedient.
Since I had first been trapped in this subconscious
reality, I had not spared the time or the energy to consid-
er the reason and psychology behind many of the mental
analogues that constituted this inner universe. I had mere-
ly accepted and tried to deal with them, to search through
them for a way out, a way to freedom and my own body.
Now, as I watched the grisly parade before me, I began to
wonder what this collection of monsters was representa-
tive of. Why was Child’s core of energy and intelligence
trapped in this place, bound to this single minim of his
entire subconscious universe? What were these scorpions
that surrounded him and maintained their constant, evil
vigil?
I examined them more closely and discovered that they
did not have that surface sheen of reality that the centaur
and the wolf had possessed. They shifted, as if they were