Page 38

In vain Oriax seethed.

A second kick. A cry of pain.

“Fall, you ——!” Trent yelled. “Fall!”

A last kick, and this one was straight into Pete’s temple. The blow stunned him. He reached for a handhold, caught only air, and for an awful moment that stretched on and on, he tottered between life and death.

Then he fell.

It took only a very few seconds for him to fall the forty or fifty feet to the ground, to smack into the crumbled concrete and rock fragments below. He had no time to scream. Just enough time to achieve momentum so that he hit the ground with a surprisingly loud sound.

Pete lay still. His skull was broken open like an egg, like some terrible real-world Humpty Dumpty. Gelatinous pink brain matter pushed up out of the rupture and oozed onto still-hot rock.

Trent hugged the rock wall, took several seconds to catch his breath, and then carefully, no longer needing to rush, finished his descent.

Before he reached the bottom, cursing furiously as his hands blistered from the heat, Messenger, Oriax, and I were there beneath him.

There standing over the gruesome body of his victim.

And the Master of the Game was there as well, still a tableau of writhing serpentine horror.

Trent, panting, pumped his seared, smoking fist in the air. “I won! Yeah! I won! Take that!”

Did he even take note of the fact that he had just committed murder? Did it even cross his mind that the body at his feet was his friend? Did he smell the sickening aroma of human flesh as the very matter that had held his friend’s mind cooked?

“The game is finished, the winner decided,” the Master of the Game intoned in his bowels-of-hell voice.

“Hell, yes, it’s over,” Trent snarled.

“The winner is he who first touched the ground.” Then the Game Master extended his serpent hand and, with a rattlesnake finger, pointed. At Pete.

“Idiot!” Oriax said. “You stupid, stupid boy. We had uses for you! You could have done great things!”

Trent looked at her and his blank expression seemed to confirm her judgment of stupidity.

“He’s all yours,” Oriax said, her voice cold now, emptied of all emotion. And she was gone.

Trent seemed bereft. It was all beginning, I thought, to dawn on him. Oriax had been his ally, of sorts. And now she was gone in a wave of disgust and disappointment. He had won nothing. He had been only the second to touch the ground.

His friend lay dead and the nightmare freak show that was the Master of the Game was speaking to Messenger. “Have I performed my office?”

“You have,” Messenger said. “You may withdraw.”

Without a word or gesture the Game Master retreated into mist, which now swallowed the tower. When he was gone, the mist withdrew, and the tower of rock and lava was no more. The ground beneath our feet was smooth once again. We still occupied a space too large by orders of magnitude to be a basement, but the weights and the bench and the forlorn sticks of furniture were all back in place.

And Pete’s head, that broken egg, was healing. The fracture was closing. The blood that matted his hair, the sizzling brain matter, obscenely reminiscent of scrambled eggs, was sucked back into his skull. There was an audible snap when the bone rejoined.

Then, slowly, Pete began to climb to his feet, he who had been indisputably dead. He was slow and stiff, but far more spry than a person should be under the circumstances.

Messenger turned to me.

I knew what he wanted me to do.

10

ARE THERE THINGS YOU CAN DO WITHOUT really knowing how you do them? Can you explain how you can ride a bike? I mean, really understand not that you can do it, but how the bike doesn’t just fall over?

I can enter the mind of a person condemned to punishment. I just can. I don’t know how, I only know that I close my eyes and I focus on that person, and just as the physical world sort of moves aside at times to avoid my touch, so the barriers of Trent’s mind moved aside so that he had no sensation of me being in there with him. In there, inside his brain. Inside his memories.