His mind raced. What was it they said about the gods? They wouldn’t exist if there weren’t people to believe in them? And that applied to everything. Reality was what went on inside people’s heads. And in front of him were hundreds of people really believing what they were seeing . . .
Victor scrabbled among the rubbish on Bezam’s bench for some scissors or a knife, and found neither. The machine whirred on, winding reality from the future to the past.
In the background, he could hear Gaspode saying, ‘I expect I’ve saved the day, right?’
The brain normally echoes with the shouts of various inconsequential thoughts seeking attention. It takes a real emergency to get them to shut up. It was happening now. One clear thought that had been trying to make itself heard for a long time rang out in the silence.
Supposing there was somewhere where reality was a little thinner than usual? And supposing you did something there that weakened reality even more. Books wouldn’t do it. Even ordinary theatre wouldn’t do it, because in your heart you knew it was just people in funny clothes on a stage. But Holy Wood went straight from the eye into the brain. In your heart you thought it was real. The clicks would do it.
That was what was under Holy Wood Hill. The people of the old city had used the hole in reality for entertainment. And then the Things had found them.
And now people were doing it again. It was like learning to juggle lighted torches in a firework factory. And the Things had been waiting . . .
But why was it still happening? He’d stopped Ginger.
The film clicked on. There seemed to be a fog around the picture throwing box, blurring its outline.
He snatched at the spinning handle. It resisted for a moment, and then broke. He gently pushed Bezam off his chair, picked it up and hit the throwing box with it. The chair exploded into splinters. He opened the cage at the back and took out the salamanders, and still the film danced on the distant screen.
The building shook again.
You only get one chance, he thought, and then you die.
He pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around his hand. Then he reached out for the flashing line of the film itself, and gripped it.
It snapped. The box jerked backwards. Film went on unreeling in glittering coils which lunged at him briefly and then slithered down to the floor.
Clickaclick . . . a . . . click.
The reels spun to a halt.
Victor cautiously stirred the heap of film with his foot. He’d been half expecting it to attack him like a snake.
‘Have we saved the day?’ prompted Gaspode. ‘I’d ap�preciate knowing.’
Victor looked at the screen.
‘No,’ he said.
There were still images there. They weren’t very clear, but he could still make out the vague shapes of himself and Ginger, hanging on to existence. And the screen itself was moving. It bulged here and there, like ripples of a pool of dull mercury. It looked unpleasantly familiar.
‘They’ve found us,’ he said.
‘Who have?’ said Gaspode.
‘You know those ghastly creatures you were talking about?’
Gaspode’s brow furrowed. ‘The ones from before the dawnatime?’
‘Where they come from, there is no time,’ said Victor. The audience was stirring.
‘We must get everyone out of here,’ he said. ‘But without panicking-‘
There was a chorus of screams. The audience was waking up.
The screen Ginger was climbing out. She was three times normal size and flickered visibly. She was also vaguely transparent, but she had weight, because the floor buckled and splintered under her feet.
The audience was climbing over itself to get away. Victor fought his way down the aisle just as Poons’ wheelchair went past backwards in the flow of people, its occupant flailing desperately and shouting, ‘Hey! Hey! It’s just getting good!’
The Chair grabbed Victor’s arm urgently.
‘Is it meant to do this?’ he demanded.
‘No!’
‘It’s not some sort of special kinematographic effect, then?’ said the Chair hopefully.
‘Not unless they’ve got really good in the last twenty-four hours,’ said Victor. ‘I think it’s the Dungeon Dimensions.’
The Chair stared intently at him.
‘You are young Victor, aren’t you,’ he said.
‘Yes. Excuse me,’ said Victor. He pushed past the astonished wizard and climbed over the seats to where Ginger was still sitting, staring at her own image. The monster Ginger was looking around and blinking very slowly, like a lizard.
‘That’s me?’
‘No!’ said Victor. ‘That is, yes. Maybe. Not really. Sort of. Come on.’
‘But it looks just like me!’ said Ginger, her voice modulated with hysteria.
‘That’s because they’re having to use Holy Wood! It . . . it defines how they can appear, I think,’ said Victor hurriedly. He tugged her out of the seat and into the air, his feet kicking up mist and scattering banged grains. She stumbled along after him, looking over her shoulder.
‘There’s another one trying to come out of the screen,’ she said.
‘Come on!’
‘It’s you!’
‘I’m me! It’s . . . something else! It’s just having to use my shape!’
‘What shape does it normally use?’
‘You don’t want to know!’
‘Yes I do! Why do you think I asked?’ she yelled, as they stumbled through the broken seats.
‘It looks worse than you can imagine!’
‘I can imagine some pretty bad things!’
‘That’s why I said worse!’
‘Oh.’
The giant spectral Ginger passed them, flickering like a strobe light, and smashed its way out through the wall. There were screams from the outside.
‘It looks like it’s getting bigger,’ whispered Ginger.
‘Go outside,’ said Victor. ‘Get the wizards to stop it.’
‘What’re you going to do?’
Victor drew himself up to his full height. ‘There are some Things’, he said, ‘that a man has to do by himself.’
She gave him a look of irritated incomprehension.
‘What? What? Do you want to go to the lavatory or something?’
‘Just get out!’
He shoved her towards the doors, then turned and saw the two dogs looking at him expectantly.
‘And you two, too,’ he said.
Laddie barked.
‘Dog’s gotta stay by ‘is master, style of fing,’ said Gaspode, shame-facedly.
Victor looked around in desperation, picked up a fragment of seat, opened the door, threw the wood as far as possible and shouted ‘Fetch!’
Both dogs bounded away after it, propelled by instinct. On his way past, though, Gaspode had just enough selfcontrol to say, ‘You bastard!’
Victor pulled open the door of the picture-throwing room and came out with handfuls of Blown Away.
The giant Victor was having trouble leaving the screen. The head and one arm had pulled free and were threedimensional. The arm flailed vaguely -at Victor as he methodically threw coils of octo-cellulose over it. He ran back to the booth and pulled out the stacks of clicks that Bezam, in defiance of common sense, had stored under the bench.
Working with the methodical calmness of bowel-twisting terror, he carried the cans by the armload to the screen and heaped them there. The Thing managed to wrench another arm free of two-dimensionality and tried to scrabble at them, but whatever was controlling it was having trouble controlling this new shape. It was probably unused to having only two arms, Victor told himself.
He threw the last can on to the heap.
‘In our world you have to obey our rules,’ he said. ‘And I bet you burn just as well as anything else, hey?’
The Thing struggled to pull a leg free.
Victor patted his pockets. He ran back to the booth and scrabbled around madly.
Matches. There weren’t any matches!
He pushed open the doors to the, foyer and dashed out into the street, where the crowds were milling around in horrified fascination and watching a fifty-foot Ginger disentangling Itself from the wreckage of a building.
Victor heard a clicking beside him. Gaffer the handleman was intently capturing the scene on film.
The Chair was shouting at Dibbler.
‘Of course we can’t use magic against it! They need magic! Magic only makes them stronger.’
‘You must be able to do something!’ screamed Dibbler.
‘My dear sir, we didn’t start meddling with things best left -‘ the Chair hesitated in mid-snarl, ‘unmeddled-with with,’ he finished lamely.
‘Matches!’ Victor shouted. ‘Matches! Hurry!’
They all stared at him.
Then the Chair nodded. ‘Ordinary fire,’ he said. ‘You’re right. That should do it. Good thinking, boy.’ He fumbled in a pocket and produced the bundle of matches that chain�smoking wizards always carried.
‘You can’t burn the Odium,’ snapped Dibbler. ‘There’s heaps of film in there!’
Victor ripped a poster off the wall, wrapped it in a crude torch, and lit one end.
‘That’s what I’m going to burn,’ he said.
‘ ‘Scuse me-‘
‘Stupid! Stupid!’ shouted Dibbler. ‘That stuff burns really fast!’
‘ ‘Scuse me-‘