Quicksilver(96)

When I turned the corner, I saw the nun’s habit that the Nihilim had torn off like thinnest paper and cast aside. Ahead on the left, a door was swinging shut of its own weight. I knew that beyond lay the stairs to the basement.

Pistol in hand, I stepped onto the landing. The Nihilim had gone down in darkness, evidently needing no light to see. I found the wall switch, and in the fall of light, the concrete stairs swelled up from the gloom.

I hesitated to follow my quarry. The orphans were forbidden to venture into that lower realm, though from time to time we went in little groups, more in a spirit of adventure than disobedience. A structure as large as Mater Misericordi? had complex mechanical systems, and the world below was a maze of pipes and pumps and boilers, furnaces, chillers, and much arcane machinery that I couldn’t name. There were uncountable places where the monster could lie in wait and spring upon me so abruptly that I might not have time to bring the pistol to bear.

Just then I experienced a Panthea moment, my gift maturing to include vivid clairvoyance. I saw the fiend retrieve a long-handled monkey wrench from behind a large holding tank full of superheated water, where it had stashed the tool long ago. I saw it moving through a puzzlement of water lines and waste lines and electrical conduits, slouching past an array of breaker boxes. It stooped and applied the jaws of the wrench to a hexagonal coupling at a junction of pipes. Abruptly the vision fast-forwarded. A fierce blue-orange flash. Glass exploding out of the windows on the upper floors of the building. Fire churning through the hallways. The Nihilim intended to flood the basement with natural gas. The pleasure it would have taken in the slaughter of a few children was nothing compared to the joy it would take in roasting them all.

Pistol in a two-handed grip, I hurried down the stairs and located a pair of wall switches. The first lit the room around me, and the second activated a long string of pathway lights fixed to the ceiling beams.

Psychic magnetism. I focused on a mental image of the Nihilim and moved with caution, as quickly as I dared, under the string of lights, each about fifteen feet from the other, my shadow swelling and diminishing, swelling and diminishing.

The basement of the orphanage and school is like the thwarting maze of rooms that, in dreams of stalking Death, makes the sleeper’s heart race toward rupture until he wakes sheathed in sweat, with a scream snared in his throat. At that moment, it seemed to have been constructed and equipped specifically to provide a Nihilim with infinite places of concealment. The path lights brightened only the center of each room, leaving shadows to crawl the farther reaches.

As I approached a doorway, a second moment of clairvoyance rocked me to a halt: a summer day, a patio splashed with sunshine, a wheelchair. I was in the chair, a paraplegic, my head tipped back as I watched birds wheeling across the sky. My left hand had been amputated, my right eye removed and sewn shut. My face was horribly disfigured.

Sometimes such visions are of what might happen, not of what will inevitably happen. So said Panthea. On the other hand, maybe both of these foreseeings would be fulfilled, the school blown to ruins in a gas blast and me—what was left of me—stitched together to pass my years imagining scenarios in which I hadn’t screwed up.

When the vision passed and I could summon the courage, I went through the doorway low and fast, leading with the Glock. I moved sideways and put my back against the wall to the right of the door and scanned the room ahead. Nothing. Just the sound of water rushing through pipes and relays clicking and small motors purring and the tick-tick-tick of something.

I moved on, as champions of the natural law are expected to do even if they would rather not. Two chambers later, I was so deep in the bowels of the basement that the interior entrance I had used and the exterior entrance that lay ahead were equidistant. Which is when the lights went off.

My preternatural gift might be maturing, but my brain was stuck in late adolescence. In my rush to avert the destruction of Mater Misericordi?, I had not been sufficiently clear of mind to foresee that my quarry, accustomed to being predator rather than prey, might blind me.

The path-light switch was rooms away. I had no idea where to find the one that would turn on other fluorescents or incandescents in this immediate space.

Disorientation doesn’t take minutes to overcome a person in absolute darkness. It at once disables the gyroscope in your head, so the way before you seems to be the way behind; you soon perceive that the floor, which you know damn well is a concrete slab sunk firmly in the earth, is moving subtly underfoot, yawing like the deck of a ship.

Nihilim. Tentacled and taloned. Seer in the dark. Eater of hearts. It would be coming. Was coming.

I turned in place, the Glock thrust in front of me, cocking my head left and right and left, listening for a footstep, a rustle, an expelled breath. Bubbles of air rattled past in a water pipe. A pump shuddered to life. A valve opened with a thin screech. Still turning in place, I heard an exhalation but then realized that it was one of mine. I held my breath. Maybe I heard something other than the many ambient sounds of that space or maybe psychic magnetism told me now. I stopped turning and squeezed the trigger once, twice, three times.

Something metallic rang against the concrete floor, followed by a softer, heavier sound. I began to breathe again but didn’t move. Listened. Waited.

After a minute or so, the path lights came on overhead. At my feet lay Sister Margaret, as naked as the day she’d been born. The Nihilim do not leave behind a monstrous corpse. They die as Rishon, preserving the secret of the first universe and the fact of their intrusion into this one.