The Barsoom Project

Chapter Sixteen

The fog swallowed them. Snow Goose seemed sure of her directions. There was rarely a choice. They followed ridges and smooth rock, the path of least resistance. Where the path forked, Max glimpsed smoke drifting from Snow Goose’s mouth.

Now they were crossing a land bridge so high up that the floor vanished into the mist, and only giant stalagmites rising up like mountains through the clouds told them there was any floor at all. They trooped single file, and Max found himself behind Charlene. She was limping. A glimpse of her profile showed excitement and anticipation and a certain sadness.

“Charlene?”

She half-turned with that oddly angular grace: she reminded him of a praying mantis. She was breathing too hard, trying to disguise it behind a game smile.

“Do you miss your friend? Eviane?”

Charlene sighed. As tall as she was, she was losing inches, drooping. Gravity was pulling her down. Brother Orson hung back to listen to the conversation.

“We’re friends, but… we’d barely met,” she said wistfully.

“How’s that?” Orson asked.

“We met on the Gaming channels. For maybe a year we’ve been playing everything we could get into, and she kept telling me about Dream Park. I’d heard of it. She said that I had to come. Tell the truth, I wasn’t all that hot on it. I thought one of the Cook Islands, or maybe Greece. But I wanted to meet Eviane.” She paused. “I don’t have that many friends. So I came, and before I could blink, Eviane was killed.”

“Doesn’t seem fair, does it? How’s your leg?”

She smiled ruefully. “I thought I was hiding that. I can walk it out.”

Orson noticeably straightened up. “If you need help carrying anything, let me know.”

Her long face softened and her eyes shone gratefully.

The bridge narrowed up ahead, and now walking single file became more critical.

Max knew he shouldn’t look down, but his eyes wouldn’t obey. Down there in the frozen, crawling wastes, something lived, something watched. He knew it. Maybe not alive. Maybe dead and damned…

From up ahead came a repetition of the roaring, piercing bass note. Quake! The entire cave shook with it. Max dropped to his belly, set his cheek against the stone of the natural bridge, and waited. He saw Johnny Welsh lose his balance, drop to his hands and knees, and roll toward the edge anyway.

Trianna caught him with one arm, helped him, shaking, to his feet. “I’m always falling for blondes,” he said.

The mist thickened and thinned in pulses. The tremors had not quite died. Yarnall, taking an unsteady lead, kept peeking back over his shoulder as if the bunch of them might rabbit at any moment. The bridge now measured barely two feet across. Beneath gaped infinity.

If you focused your eyes carefully into the depths, the mists occasionally parted, and the cavern stretched away into endless night. It seemed to Max that he could see stars down there, but it might have been the reflection of strange light on ice crystals. He shivered.

Step by careful step, they crossed that bridge. Those two feet of path began to feel like a tightrope. Snow Goose stopped them. “Wait. Stop now, and find your breathing.”

“What?” Bowles said cautiously.

“Your breathing.” She placed her hands about an inch below her navel. “Breathe down to here, to the center of your body. You will find the balance you will need.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Orson complained. “Center of my body?”

“Ignore the flesh,” she insisted. “Feel your way to the center. Steady your breathing and visualize, or you will not survive.”

“What I visualize,” Orson whimpered, “is getting chucked off this bridge, and controlling my breathing all the way to the bottom.”

The wind keened, sighed mockingly. Despite his uneasy balance, and the strangeness, and the fear he felt here on the edge of infinity, Max searched within himself, struggled to see something beneath the layers of clothing, the muscle,

(the fat) the organs and tissues,

(the fat) and down to the bones themselves, saw himself as a skeleton, standing on a two-foot bridge over the very pit of Hell, that damned wind whistling hollow through his bones.

When he found that place, curiously, he felt warmer, more relaxed. When he opened his eyes, there was less fear.

Her next words touched his ears as from across a gulf. “Now keep your breathing constant and smooth, and follow me.”

Max chose his steps with care. Once he stumbled, wavered, lost his balance, but his toe found purchase where there should have been only air.

(He reached his toe out again to test the “air” beyond the strip of bridge. He found solidity, but it was invisible. He decided not to trust it… but he felt better.)

The path began to widen. The group had just heaved a collective sigh of relief when Another terrible scream of rage.

Close, and from no discernible direction. Yarnall moved more quickly, trying to get them onto the widened path. It was almost six feet across here, and they began to walk in twos, Yarnall and Kevin in the front, war clubs facing off against the unknown. Kevin clutched at the bag around his neck, as if milking it for strength.

Behind him were Orson and Snow Goose, and behind them Max and Charlene.

The mist congealed and cleared again and showed him unreality, illusion. Max tried to blink it away:

It stood twenty feet tall. He would have called it a woman, because of the pendulous breasts only partially concealed by an eight-foot cascade of flowing black hair. But the face was a demon’s face, wild and inhuman, with brown teeth like chisels and eyes that closed to slits. With each breath, the entire wrinkled face expanded and contracted. Her arms, muscular and wide-spread, were tipped with evil hooked nails longer than the head of Max’s spear.

That wasn’t the worst. Not by a bunch. The creature had only one leg, and that leg came from, well, from the genitalia.

“What do you call someone with no arms and no legs, with a wooden stick up his backside?” Johnny asked quietly.

That thick, obscene leg flexed, and the creature stretched down. Hooked nails curled around a misted stalagmite. A quick convulsion of python muscles, and the great chunk of rock snapped off in its hand, a ten-foot limestone club that coruscated in the darkness like a wet fuse.

Snow Goose backed them up. “Paija!” she said urgently. “We’ve gotta go back to where the path is too narrow for her to follow, and get ready.”

“No argument here,” Max heard Yarnall mutter.

They backed up along the path. The Paija hissed venomously at them, Cerberus at the gates of Hades.

“Your amulets!” she cried.

Where did I put that? Max rooted around in his bag until he found his gift from Martin the Arctic Fox, an owl’s claw petrified almost into a knot. Snow Goose took it. She took Kevin’s leather pouch and poured a thin stream of black powder into the palm of her hand. Her round face crinkled happily. “Strength! Soot is stronger than fire.”

“I should be carrying Ajax cleanser,” Johnny Welsh said. “Stronger than soot.”

Trianna rubbed his shoulder. “Your bird worked when we needed it, Johnny.”

He abandoned his scowl and gave her a quick hug.

Each Adventurer made his contribution in turn, and the little pile grew. The woman-demon grew tired of waiting. She hopped a step closer along the stone bridge. The bridge groaned in distress.

“Hurry!” Snow Goose bit her lip, thinking quickly. “You spoke of the fiber in your backpacks. You said it had power, perhaps more power than the amulets. Quickly, take them off, stack them in a pile.”

Yarnall, Hebert, and Ollie shucked their backpacks and complied. They kept worried eyes on the she-thing and flapped their arms for balance, but moved as quickly as possible.

“The suspense is killing me,” Kevin said to Johnny as they shucked backpacks. “What do you call someone with no arms and no legs, with a wooden stick up the backside?”

“Pop.”

“Groan.”

Hippogryph added his backpack to the pile.

“What is that creature?” Bowles asked.

“Good question,” Max said ruminatively. “Looks like something out of ‘Saucer Sluts Meet Hercules.”

Bowles looked pained. “Please. I was a child. When I signed the contracts they called it ‘Space Maidens on Olympus.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Shh,” Snow Goose said urgently. “It’s called a Paija. It’s a demon, but the Cabal must have brought it here to guard the entrance. This isn’t good.”

Max whispered, “Why would it be?”

“Heh. Yes. But they must have more power than Daddy thought. Hurry.”

She took a leather thong from around her neck, pulled a tiny goose-doll out of her cleavage. She looked around at the others. “Ahh

… Johnny, we don’t want to deplete your charm. Let’s see. Oliver. Frankish Oliver.” Ollie stepped forward, and she opened the bundle that he wore around his neck, and sighed with relief. “Good. You also have a winged Inua. We can lead.” She hunkered down. “Now, the rest of you. All of you have spirit selves. All of you have both flesh and a spirit form. The fleshly form is not strong enough. But perhaps our spirit forms could prevail, If we can trick it, then its magic, its life force, will be ours to command.”

She took her totem, and Oliver’s, a hawk carved from some hard black substance. “I need string, and I need something that was part of a satellite,” she said.

Charlene handed her a pair of gloves. “Put these on.”

“No, it’s for-”

“Put them on, Snow Goose.”

The Inuit maiden shrugged with her eyebrows and pulled the thin gloves over her hands. Delicately, Charlene handed her a spool of thread. “Falling Angel cable. The gloves are made of it too. You don’t want to touch the cable with anything but the gloves.”

She nodded. She wrapped the two totems together with the thread, then looped the spool into the bundle as well. “We need a song,” she said. “A sacred song.”

“We don’t know any,” Max protested.

“No-one of yours will do. Weren’t you singing one earlier that spoke of our land? We must pull our worlds closer together.”

Orson groaned. “Kevin?”

Smiling and buck-toothed, Kevin strode forward. “Let me see… ”

Orson covered his ears as Kevin elaborated on his previous theme, picking up the adventures of Eskimo Nell, Dead-Eye Dick, and Mexican Pete in the midst of the most grueling contest in the annals of song.

Snow Goose was all business, chanting happily over her little bundle. The group chimed along with Kevin as the Ballad of Eskimo Nell progressed to its glorious climax.

“Now!” Snow Goose said. Her eyes rolled up, her lips moved, Dah dee dah dee dah diddity dee- “Inua of my Ancestors! We fight to keep your rite. Inua of my Ancestors, be at our side this night. O Children of the freezing air, come live within me now. Air spirits come, and join in war to shatter Ahk-lut’s dream, ally with us against an evil folk who would blaspheme. Set us free of heavy flesh, set us free from our illusions, set us FREE!”

The air was humming. The bridge beneath their feet vibrated like a plucked guitar string. Max could feel it in his teeth, in his fillings. (Dammit, that hurt! The feeling was like the little chill he’d had on the airplane — what seemed a lifetime ago, but now deeper and stronger, and ouch!)

Snow Goose joined hands with Frankish Oliver. He seemed nervous at first, trying to twist his hand out of her grip, but she held on as the vibration grew stronger and stronger. At last the sound was recognizable as human voices, stripped of euphonics and amplified staggeringly. It was a chant, a ritual chant that was all undertones, a sound like a row of giant gongs ringing beneath three feet of oil.

Snow Goose’s outline was the first to change, followed swiftly by Frankish Oliver’s. They became like fluid metal, running together, peeling apart, and the light expanded until it surrounded the other Gamers as well, bathing them all in a silvery, gloriously fluxing incandescence.

At first Max saw only a blurred glow. It moved, shifted, and he understood: something intangible was pulling itself free from Max. A moment later he could see its shape.

It was himself, in a way. Once, after a debilitating stretch of fever, he had lost enough weight in his face to see the cheekbones that shaped it, and he recognized them now. But that perfect, idyllic shape turned and gave him a nod, smiling as if they shared some great secret. Max couldn’t hear the undertone chanting anymore-it was more like he was a part of it, his body one of the notes. He turned to the other Gamers, and was astonished. From each of them flowed an ectomorphic form, more beautiful than anything they could have aspired to in life. The forms rose above them, hovered there, then joined hands in a circle.

Max stared, trying to absorb what he was seeing. The cave, once the very heart of darkness, glowed with a light which was not of man, or of man’s doing. It was a holy light, a miniature aurora borealis, a light which flowed from within the floating, flaming figures.

The floating “spirit” of Snow Goose rotated slowly in the air, her face a calm oval. “Now,” she said, “we go.”

The spirit forms ranged ahead. Max felt his spear humming with power, and clutched it tightly. It felt warm. The stone bridge they traversed was as narrow, and as frighteningly high over an unfathomable pit, as it had been before; but there was something else. Something new had entered the equation.

It was a sense of possibilities.

The Paija stood waiting for them. It was gigantic, bestially beautiful, profane beyond his imaginings, balancing on that single obscene leg like something spawned in a Tijuana freak show.

Its single leg was more like the trunk of an elephant. Boneless. flexible. It weaved from side to side like some kind of top-heavy cobra, beckoning them onward to death.

For a moment the tableau was complete, and still. Max faded back a little, watching the others, saw Frankish Oliver gripping his war club as if it connected him to the spirit image floating above his head.

The Paija sniffed at the air, her thick, bovine nose wrinkling as if scenting something distasteful.

She gripped her stalagmite club and screamed defiantly and smashed it down on the bridge. The span of rock danced savagely. Dust and rock rained from the invisible ceiling. Kevin fell to his knees and had to be helped up by Bowles. For a moment a twist of genuine fear crossed that freckled face. Then bravado won out, and he was strong and brave once again.

The Paija opened its mouth, her mouth, and grinned. Max had never seen so many broken edges in one place. It looked like a junkyard for dental cutlery. The teeth were set in at odd angles, rows and rows of them, like shark’s teeth.

The Paija attacked.

“Onward!” Snow Goose yelled, and like the fools they were, they charged.

And above them, so moved their ethereal doubles. With every step they took, the floating figures above them seemed to gain power. They shone more brightly. The Paija ceased her raving, examined them suspiciously, seemed to reconsider- Max saw Trianna’s spirit fly at the enormous creature like a fairy on speed, moving with such grace and agility that the breath froze in his throat. Quite simply, she was beautiful. The Paija swung at her with its improvised club, and she backpedaled, doing a kind of breast stroke in the air.

Max snuck a peek at the flesh-and-blood Trianna, who was transfixed, her lips slightly parted, eyes gleaming with excitement.

The Paija couldn’t seem to touch her. Now the other spirit forms flew in, and when they linked together, that aurora effect was magnified. A fluxing electric rainbow blossomed, and touched the Paija.

The creature screeched in pain and indignation that these tiny creatures would dare to harm it. Far from being slowed, it charged, swinging the club. The stalagmite smashed down just short of Snow Goose, who scrambled back and then caught her balance again. “Don’t run! Don’t run! It will feed on your fear!”

The Paija glared at them, the forest of black hair shadowing her face. Grunting, it took another step.

The ethereal figures fluttered above it, weaving in and out like a flock of glowing hummingbirds. The Paija swiped at them with the club, handling it like a flyswatter, and only the unnatural agility of the spirit forms kept them from Oops. The Paija made contact with Orson’s image, just a glancing blow, but Max’s brother said, “Ooof!” and rubbed at his shoulder, where a red glowing mark began to grow.

The Paija was beginning to catch the rhythm now. Charlene’s image caught a nasty wallop, and Charlene cried, “Wha’?” A red stain began to grow on one leg, glowing in the dark like some kind of phosphorescent fungus. The spirit creatures began to fade.

“Join hands!” Snow Goose grabbed Hebert and Hippogryph, panting as if with physical exertion.

Max reached out for Yarnall’s wrist. Yarnall joined with Kevin. The twelve Adventurers formed a semicircle facing the beast.

The creature snarled, sensing victory. The club smashed again on the bridge. The Paija dropped the entire force of its being into the blow. An eight-foot section of rock gave way, splintering and crumbling with a roar like the end of worlds. Max stutterstepped, struggling for balance.

Snow Goose remained erect, but her face was no longer so strong and determined. She stared down into the gulf before them, the chunks of rock spinning in crazy slow motion into infinity, and she was no longer sure.

The Paija grinned at them and leapt over the gap. Her suction-cup foot gripped the bridge, leaving a moist ring where it landed. She hopped forward.

Max saw Snow Goose crumbling, and he forced himself to his feet. Dammit, he had to do something, and he had to do it now. Tag-team!

In a pro wrestling match the audience would see you screaming obscenities, but they couldn’t hear. It didn’t matter what you said. Max stood as tall as he could and he screamed up at the Paija. “Monsterrr! We challenge you! We’re gonna rip your lips off and make you kiss your own backside!”

Not particularly inspired, but it got her attention. She smiled a smile that said, me and you, numbnuts in a universal language. He hefted his spear and pointed it, waiting for magic.

Nothing.

I’m dead, he thought.

But the ethereal double was more substantial now, brighter: he could no longer see through it. It was true! The Paija fed on their fear, and their doubles fed on their courage. He put on his best drill sergeant’s voice. “Get up, you slackers! Face this thing off!”

The Paija growled at them, as if undecided, and then Max saw his double launch its spirit spear directly between the Paija’s eyes. The monster screamed, reared back, and clasped its wound. The club rose up, and thundered down again directly at Max.

Here goes nothing. Max gritted his teeth and kept the spear upraised. The club landed to the side, deflected by his spear thrust.

The monster was horribly confused now, and in pain. The other Adventurers joined him, joined hands, screamed in concert. They backed the Paija up a short hop, and when they gestured aggressively, their doubles attacked.

It was playing possum. It sprang back to life, and caught Hippogryph’s double a good lick. Hippogryph yelped and grabbed his shoulder, which began to glow red. Charlene’s double, trying to swoop in close for a shot at its eyes, caught a grazing blow and went spiraling off to the side, almost slamming into a stalagmite before it could catch itself. Charlene’s entire right side went red.

But slowly, surely, the Paija was driven back. They cheered, and they screamed, and Max said, “What the hell!” and hurled his spear. It caught the creature in the throat. The Paija staggered backward a hop, teetered for balance, and fell from the bridge. Howling, it tumbled blindly into the blackness.

They all moved to the edge to see it fall, watch it die. Max’s double landed in front of him, beautiful, lean, and muscular glowing in that darkness within the earth, and it smiled.

Hell. He was a hero!