Circle Thrice

Until she could see that there was nothing all around her.

Everything had gone.

She gazed out at an unrelievedly gray landscape, like a far-off planet. There was no color except gray, shades of gray, close to black in places.

Nobody.

Except that the gray of the burned grass held strange blacker silhouettes, human shapes, distorted, hands high, running, falling figures. Nothing remained of her friends except those smudges on the smoking ground.

Krysty cried out once and collapsed in a dead, mindless faint.

DOC HAD PLUNGED directly into a black pit that held a lake of freezing black water.

He felt too tired to struggle and submitted to the icy embrace, letting himself sink.

RYAN SAT BY A GRAY SEA, where sullen breakers washed slowly over rounded boulders. Farther along the bleak shore he could see two saddled horses standing in the edge of the water, side by side.

He looked around the other way, and wasn’t surprised to see a tall, slender figure in a long black cloak, the hood pulled up over the shadowed face.

“You come for me?”

“I come for everyone, Ryan Cawdor.”

“I didn’t expect you yet.”

“It is rare that anyone expects my arrival. They always look for me on the morrow.”

“Somewhere else?”

“Perhaps in Somarra.”

The figure moved toward him, seeming to float over the restless shingle, the cloak widening until it filled half of the horizon.

“I thought I could play you at chess,” Ryan said, gesturing toward the board that stood open on a large flat stone in front of him.

A spark of interest lit the deep-set eyes beneath the hood. “How did you know I played chess?”

“Seen the movie.”

“Ah, yes. The weary knight. That was so very long ago, Ryan Cawdor.”

The one-eyed man arranged the pieces on the board, taking off a pair of pawns, concealing them behind his back, then offering them to the cloaked figure, who tapped the left hand and smiled at Ryan.

“Black. Appropriate, is it not?”

They began to play, accompanied by the ceaseless whispering of the waves on the beach.

“This is the place where ignorant armies clash by night,” Death commented.

Ryan stared at the board, realizing with a shock of horror that he didn’t know how to play the game. The pieces weren’t familiar to him. Instead of knights, bishops, pawns and queens, there were dragons, monks and razors.

When he looked up from the board, the dark figure had gone. So had the beach.

Now he was standing in a ruined ville, with fireworks exploding in the distance in showers of cascading reds, yellows and blues. Ryan walked through a gaping doorway, finding himself in an open place, filled with lines of washing, endless rows of white sheets, making it impossible to see more than a few paces.

He could hear someone sobbing, panting, ragged breaths that flowed with pain.

“Hey, there,” Ryan called softly, sensing that he was in a place of danger.

A hand came around the edge of one of the sheets, close by him, pressing it against the body of whoever was hiding behind it. Immediately there was a spreading patch of dark blood, black against the starched white of the sheet.

A face, young, with curly hair, wearing heavily tinted glasses, peered at Ryan.

“Can I help you? Looks like you stopped one there.”

The handsome youth didn’t answer, but staggered away from Ryan, through another gate on the far side of the area. He stumbled and fell into what looked to Ryan like the biggest garbage heap in the world.

The youth held both hands clasped to his stomach, where Ryan could see a hideous gash had opened him up. Loops of intestines, gray and yellow, streaked with pink, were tumbling from the wound, trailing in the fly-covered filth.

It was a most dreadful way to die.

Ryan had closed his eye for a moment, not wanting to watch the agonized death throes.

As he opened it again, the world had changed.

The garbage heap had vanished.

Now he was riding alone in the back of a filthy cart, his hands tied tightly behind his back, wearing some triple-weird old-time clothes with a brocade frock coat and stained lace at his throat and cuffs.