He was underground, crawling through soft warm mud. Movement was made more difficult because his legs were tied together at the ankle. No, that wasn’t quite right. They weren’t exactly tied together.
They were actually joined together, the flesh and bones fused into a single clumsy, flapping limb.
The boy knew that he was hunting something or somebody who was in the dark, winding tunnels around him, ahead of him, to both sides of him, above him, below him. Behind him?
Dean had been down in the ancient catacombs for all of his eternal life. Though he spoke little or no Spanish, an old proverb came to his mind. Al vivo la hogaza, y almuerto, la mortaja .
The boy heard it very clearly, as though someone were speaking it in a lisping Catalan tongue, somewhere deep inside the vault of his skull.
“A large loaf of bread for the living, and for the dead, a shroud.”
His own voice was soundless, though Dean knew that he had moved his lips.
Somewhere far ahead was the salvation of a wine-dark ocean, braking ceaselessly on a shingled shore where discarded needles lay, mountain-high.
There was a ledge on the right, where squatted an ancient man in stained frock coat and cracked knee boots, clutching a cane of polished ebony, its handle carved from silver in the shape of a lion’s head.
“I disremember the source, dear boy, but it is better by far to dwell on your knees than to die on your feet. It is not so, dear boy?”
“No, Doc, it isn’t.”
But his mouth was filled with the warm mud, sulfurous and bitter, and Dean made no sound.
RYAN WAS ALSO LOCKED into the heart of a whirling, bright nightmare.
But it wasn’t seeming like a nightmareno gibbering phantoms in dusty corridors, no terror swimming up from the deeps of some half-remembered horror.
Just a profound sense of unease.
There was a threat of violence hanging in the air, like an unspoken promise.
Ryan was walking through a large predark house, filled with wonderful paintings and ornate statues in gold and silver and bronze, horsemen spearing snarling lions and dying warriors, slipping from life, artistically posed.
The furniture was covered in large white sheets of spotless linen, and the windows were veiled in the same material, giving a strange, muted quality to the light, like wandering in an undersea cavern.
Ryan was conscious of clocks ticking in every room. One was ormolu-and-blue porcelain, topped with the placid bust of a serene Roman emperor wearing a laurel wreath. As he passed it, the clock began to chime, a high, thin, pure sound. It chimed seventeen times.
In the corners of the corniced ceilings there were huge spiderwebs, spun from fine silvery filaments that floated in the ceaseless currents of air. Jaundiced mirrors, blotched with green mold, framed in warped mahogany, distorted Ryan’s face as he walked slowly by them.
There were high double doors that opened into the oppressive heat of an orangery, the leaded panes of glass smeared with moisture and golden lichen.
The sense of unease was deepening, and Ryan kept looking back over his shoulder. Lush foliage, dank with condensation, filled the enormous room, and it seemed that someone had just that moment moved out of sight, timing their disappearances to coincide perfectly with his turning.
He stepped out onto a long terrace, dotted with large stone jars, taller than a man. The sky was totally overcast, with not a trace of sun, though the yew hedges left odd, sharply angular shadows.
Ryan saw a copper statue of a child, stooped as though in fear, hands raised to ward off a blow. The name on the plinth simply read Lazarus.
There was a lake just visible at the bottom of a rolling expanse of lawn. And a domed monument, stark against the hillside beyond.
He was feeling sick, and he walked to sit on a wrought-iron bench, doubling over. He coughed and brought up a tangled mass of raw bloody meat and thin red worms.
DEAN HAD SUNK into the mud, feeling it suck him down, like soft hands that brushed against him, then clung and pulled, dragging him into the warm darkness.