World's End (7 page)

Still on his knees he patted the ground around him, hardly daring to believe it was real. Yet here it was, the place memory had cast him back to too many times to count: the concrete bike path, an old liquor bottle half buried in the hard dirt next to it, which Case himself might well have drained of its contents and left there, neglected and forgotten by all the world. The door shut quietly behind him. He still had the black key, still had the choice to go back.

It was night. He may have sat on that very spot for a long time if it hadn't occurred to him that the light he saw was
moon
light. That in itself was miraculous: there was a proper sky above him again. He scrambled to his feet, ran past the graffiti-clad wall, over towards the newsagency side of the tunnel.

What he beheld seemed more magical than anything he'd seen in Levaal. The beautiful clouds were fat grey brush strokes over a bright gibbous moon, beaming its white light proudly down. Tears streamed down his face; his whole body shook. He didn't know at all what the tears came from: grief, joy, gratitude? Also a peculiar anger directed he knew not where (at Shilen? Himself?). He sat in the moonlit gutter, staring up at
the sky for a long while, the moon and the stars beyond it a sight too beautiful to look away from.

He barely noticed in all that time how quiet it was, how not a single car horn sounded. He did not reflect that no trains passed on the tracks just above him. And he barely thought about whatever it might be sending little shivers through the ground he sat on.

When the night's chill broke through and the moment finally passed, he noticed the streetlights weren't on. The moonlight was all. And now he heard the silence – the absence of background traffic.

The newsagency windows were broken. It had been before him the whole time, but only now he saw it. Part of its side wall had caved in. He took a few steps out onto the road, saw nothing in either direction except a piece of litter scraping across the bitumen, pushed by wind that quickly ceased. The silence, now that he'd heard it, pressed down on him and was total. He took a breath to call out but intuition was like a hand clasping over his mouth:
shh …

Now in the distance, there was noise he could not identify. Two heavy thudding sounds, each sending a shiver through the ground he stood upon.

He went back through the train bridge, past the shut door. How loud it seemed, his shoes scuffing over the dirt. He paused, examined a patch of moonlit ground out the tunnel's further side. Yes, he saw it now: there were familiar holes punched into the hard dirt.

He crouched, touching them. A dozen such holes, give or take, identical to Tormentor tracks. A strange coincidence? Surely none of those beasts could have possibly
made
these holes.

‘Let's walk home from work,' he murmured. Along the once-familiar street by the rail tracks, the houses and apartments had no lights on at all. There were broken windows and cavedin walls, just like the newsagency's. There was a wide split in the bitumen road, which was so filled with potholes it could hardly be called a road any more. Eric was filled with an irrational sense that if he could just make it home to his apartment, everything would be OK. All this evidence of something horribly wrong would erase itself.

Dodging wide cracks he walked up the rise in the ground, and turned about at the top to look back at the city, but there were no lights at all. He heard a sound of something very large moving. Glass broke, metal squealed: he got the impression of a tank rolling over ruined streets, crushing cars as it went. The noise abruptly ceased. Wind rustled the overgrown grass of Case's old park at the bottom of the street and swept through the shoulder-high weeds all along the path.

Eric turned again to head for home, but stopped dead, seeing further up the rise a shape looming in wait for him. It stood jagged against the moonlit sky, the spikes and points along its flanks curling like fingers beckoning. Its arms were long, each with five jagged finger-blades stretching down so they almost touched the ground. The Tormentor's face was like features gouged and chipped out of glistening obsidian, tilted sideways on its neck and gazing, it seemed, right at him.

The backwards step Eric took was purely from surprise to find he was observed. What at another time might have been fear was instead cold anger at the violation this creature represented, imposing itself like this upon his homecoming. He took the gun from its holster, held it aloft, stepped towards the Tormentor. Slowly one of its hands rose; it seemed to be asking
him not to shoot. A greater shock came when its mouth opened and a voice issued from it: ‘
Waste
,' it said.

Eric was so amazed to hear it speak he laughed. ‘What? What did you say?' Its flat stony eyes looked down from a metre above. ‘You said “waste”,' Eric said. He was near enough now to reach out and touch it. ‘Do you mean I'd waste a bullet, if I shot you? What the fuck … why do you
care
if I waste my bullets? How do you even know what a bullet is, what a gun is? What the fuck are you even
doing
here?'

Its voice was like feet scraping on dirt. ‘Here
you … will find … what kills … dragons.
'

Eric pointed the gun at its face. He wanted to shoot but his hand seemed to lock. ‘What kills dragons?' he said.

Its mouth did not move to shape the words which scraped out.
‘The haiyens have … no name for them … in your speech. The haiyens … must teach you … to live in a world … which
they
come to. Your flesh is … their clay. Your flesh is … their home. Your flesh …
is
them. They … collect … clay. Until the time they … as your kind … has now learned to do … become gods.'

‘I don't understand you,' Eric said. His hand holding the gun shook. ‘I miss my apartment. I just want to see my apartment.'

Distantly there came more sounds not unlike those he'd heard before: squealing metal as something was crushed. Something crumbling and falling with booming thuds to the ground, then quiet. The Tormentor tilted its head away from him, seeming to look into the distance behind him.

‘Why don't you kill me?' Eric asked it.

It did not move or answer. He stepped yet closer to it. A rage brewed deep and hot within him, one he didn't understand at all. He held the gun to its head. ‘Why don't you try to kill me? I'm right here. Do it.'

It didn't move. Its wavering spikes all went still. ‘
A high place … will give you … sight of them.
'

He fired the gun. Its
boom
was unbelievably loud. Part of the Tormentor's face flew off. A larger part slipped more slowly to the ground, carrying with it one of the creature's eyes. Its body did not fall, still did not move. ‘What did you do to this world?' Eric said.

Its voice still came:
‘This work, my kind … did not wreak. Nor man … nor dragon.'
One of its arms – shaking – slowly lifted, pointed to the top of the rise.
‘Go there. See. Learn why you must … set the dragons … free.'

Eric went to where it pointed. He turned back twice to see if the Tormentor had toppled over yet, but it had not. Further along towards his apartment, along the same footpaths and roads he'd taken to walk home from the office – with a mind for microwave dinners, failed novels in progress, comic books newly purchased – buildings were mounds of detritus, piled like the rocks he and Case had walked through in the rubble plains. Cars were crushed flat, streetlight poles were knocked over, power lines a messy tangle. Slabs of road were tilted up. A dog appeared among the wreckage of a corner shop. It sniffed the air as if it had forgotten people altogether and could hardly believe its eyes now to see one. When Eric called to it, it ran away.

The path ahead was blocked by a pile of debris. He climbed it, slipping on loose slabs and boards, ignoring the now-familiar smell of death worming up from the pile's depths. At that moment he gave up any hope of finding his apartment still standing – or perhaps he understood how pointless the quest was in the first place. Instead he headed up a hilly side-street not even vaguely resembling the road it had been in his memories.
The homes to either side were destroyed; the corner street sign was unbelievably one of the few things undamaged. Pitt Street. The pizza place's green and red sign poked out beneath wreckage. (A girl wearing glasses had asked him out, here on this spot. His mouth full of pizza, he'd stammered in his amazement by way of reply, which she took as rejection and fled, her face pointed down with embarrassment. He'd never seen her again.)

A gust of wind came to break the silence with its howl, the smell of smoke on its breath. From here he saw the city's silhouetted skyline. The buildings' lights were all out.

Something scuttled in the rubbish, too big to be a rat. It was the dog from before, hobbling along now with a strange limp. But then he saw it
wasn't
the dog. Its head and forelegs moved on their own, being dragged along as if blown by bursts of wind. Eric had taken a few steps towards it but now he recoiled, the gun in his hand again. Something he could not see dragged the dog's body through a gap in the rubble.

He grew aware, as the wind's howl died away, that there were now many little sounds all through the ruin about him. Little taps, scrapes, creaks. His hair stood on end, despite how silly it seemed to be afraid – how could any unseen thing here be worse than the huge beast Shâ? The Tormentor's voice echoed to him as if to contradict:
You will find … what kills dragons …

He took what he meant to be one last sweeping look around at the place which had once been home, where life had been so simple and safe. It was then a shape moved through the city between the buildings. He rubbed his eyes, thinking because of its size alone that surely his eyes had been deceived: it was taller than some of the buildings it stalked between, and lit by
its own light. Its shape defied his belief further yet, for it was like nothing he'd seen, stranger even than seeing Nightmare in the sky. Its three-pointed head was made of teardrop-shaped parts. Inside each, glassy reflective points – eyes, surely – quivered like jelly. Two arms, if arms they were, held aloft enormous orbs, one pitch black, the other white and glowing brighter than the moon overhead, the beams pouring out from between the buildings like searchlights. One shone through to where he stood. There was something insect-like about the huge thing, its arms and legs thin as vines in proportion to the thickness of its head. It was a god, surely … though a god no one in Levaal had ever mentioned to Eric.

It was in view only for a few seconds between two buildings, just long enough to assure him he'd actually seen it. Distantly he heard things being crushed and metal squealing as its feet pressed down.

Something moved in the piles of brick, concrete, wood and aluminium sheets he stood upon. Little piles of debris were disturbed and fell pattering down the heap's sides. As though many things had come awake, all about him now was the rattling shuffle of moving things. Small shapes began to creep out from between the disturbed rubble. They were hidden enough and small enough that he saw no more than moving shadows.

He jumped down and ran back the way he'd come. There at the top of the rise the Tormentor had not moved, though now it had picked up one of the blasted-off pieces of its face. It balanced the piece of itself on one hand, trying with little success to place it back on its face, since its blade-fingers did not bend.

Eric hesitated and then approached it again. ‘What was that thing I saw?' he said, pointing off towards the city.

The Tormentor seemed to know what he meant. Its voice
grated out:
‘Haiyens call it … That Which … Governs Cycles of Events.'

‘And what are haiyens?'

The Tormentor didn't answer.

‘That huge thing – is that what did all this, all this destruction? Is that what kills dragons?'

‘No. It comes … later. After the rest … is settled. To change … time. When it comes, all is … already over. So do not … fear it. Those small things … which you fled from … are what you should fear.'

‘Tell me one more thing. Why are you here to help and guide me?'

He waited but it did not answer. He left it there trying to reassemble its face. Something did not sit right with him about the Tormentor being here at all.

The park near the train bridge was alive with rustling grass, although now no wind blew. He slowed to a walk, dug around his pocket for Shilen's key, and went to the door, which he knew would open for him the second he chose to go back. Sure enough it did, as soon as his hand twisted in the lock: it opened with no more ceremony than a puff of wind. When it closed behind him he was crouched on the stone floor of the dragons' sky prison once more.

Shilen stood waiting for him. ‘You don't seem surprised to see that I've returned,' Eric said.

‘Are you home now, Favoured one?'

And then he understood he'd been deceived. The destroyed world he'd walked through had been no more than an illusion. Probably the kind created from his mind and memories, filling in the details of a world the illusion's caster had never been to (whoever that caster was – Shilen, or another dragon?). The door
he'd gone through had
not
taken him back to Otherworld at all. The Entry Point was not here, or the dragons would have escaped through it, long ago. The Entry Point was behind the castle, where the dragons could not get to it. His home then was not all in ruins.

While he would later be glad it had been an illusion, in that moment he was seized by incredible anger. Without hesitation he took the gun from its holster, pointed it at her and pulled the trigger. Shilen yelped in surprise, her body flung back.

He was perhaps more shocked than she was. From the second her spinning body fell to the ground he went numb. He dropped the gun, utterly sickened, and made a noise in his throat.