New World a-Coming, Ch. 50

The Rift Portal Accident

Bassanda? 1967?

Ani’s voice:

Blackness. Silence.

Nothingness…

I’m swathed and suffocating in black cotton batting.

Gasping. Chest heaving, can’t hear my breath.

Slowly, muffled outside sounds—distant clanging bells, sizzle of electronics, a ringing in the ears. Babble of discordant distant voices.

Now: closer to hand: muffled speech. Slowed and distorted. Strange harmonics and overtones. I recognize Rina’s voice: faint, as if she is calling from far away.

I grope outward like a blind person, and one of my hands strikes someone’s arm. Even in the darkness, and unable to breathe, I know the touch of her strong thin bicep, and now I can smell her scent.

I feel downwards to find her hand. She clasps it fiercely, and a tingling jolt runs up my arm.

Electrical arcs, as from a Tesla generator, flash in front of my eyes, and now I hear the Beast’s clangorous driving wheels. Though they sound in the far distance, and it is still black before my eyes except for the random electrical flashes, and now showers of sparks, I can feel the mighty locomotive’s motion shaking my very bones.

Pinwheeling in the blackness, I grope for Rina’s face, and inadvertently the back of my hand strikes her cheek. In the blackness, I hear her gasp in surprise. But then my palm finds her ear, and I bring her head close to mine, and shout through the swathing darkness, “Are. You. All. Right?!?” My voice distant, even to my own ears. My cheek brushes hers, and there are more tingling sparks, but I feel her nod. “Yes. All right!”

Slowly the light around us grows—a chilly, steely, gray and black light, shining like chrome in the darkness. Holding Rina’s face between both hands, I lean my forehead against hers, and now I can hear her gasping and feel her quick warm breath on my lips. The light grows in its stark intensity.

We are standing inside one of the carriages of the Beast—the gallery, maybe—except that we are not standing, but floating, a foot or two off the floor, and the carriage is pinwheeling around us as if we are in weightless free fall. Rina’s face is paper white in the chilly light, the caverns of her eyes and under her high cheekbones like smudges of greasepaint on her face. There are sparks sizzling off of her short spiked hair, and my own longer hair is floating across my face and in between us, obscuring my vision.

Rina reaches up, and pulls my left hand from her face, and guides it down to one of the grips built into the back of the carriage’s upholstered seats. At that touch, there is another electrical shock, running up my arm, but now our surroundings stabilize, and, looking downward and holding Rina’s hand, I fall softly, my feet landing on the carpeted floor of the train carriage’s aisle, like a deep sea diver touching the ocean’s bottom. Now we are crouched, standing, and as I straighten, I see Rina smiling and facing me; she is looking past me, and I turn and there is Stokes, looking back us from further up the carriage. He is grinning with relief, and opens his mouth to speak, but I cannot make out his voice.

The light grows still further—though there is still muzzy blackness beyond the carriage’s tall scrolled windows. The interior light shifts toward amber, as if in Victorian gaslight. The carriage is still swaying like a boat at sea, but now my vision and hearing are clearing, and I hear Yezget-Bey calling. We three turn to look, and there he is, waving to us from the folding steel door that leads out to the open platform between the Beast’s carriages. Stokes speaks, and, though his voice is distorted, like a tape recorder speeding and slowing, I can make out the words. “Whatever just happened, we’ll talk later. Get to Baba.”

He starts down the aisle, moving quickly, jostled from side to side as the carriage sways back and forth; now it is tilting, and I have to struggle upward toward the exit, pulling myself from seat to seat. After a moment, out of instinct, I turn to look back for Rina. Even as I do, there is another sudden crack of lightning just beyond the darkened windows. The interior lights blink out, and then on again—still amber, but now weakened, and flickering as if their circuitry is failing.

A snarling sound, as of a huge sentient beast, comes from just beyond the far end of the carriage, and the folding doors at that far end suddenly explode inward, as if hammered by huge forces beyond. Something—a dense cloud, like oily smoke but thicker and more impenetrable—pours in through the open door. There are reddish flickers, of lightning or something else, within the cloud, and it advances up the carriage, rolling forward like a dust storm seen from afar, blotting out the light.

Facing the rolling dark cloud is my tiny, fierce lover, silhouetted against the blackness, her boyish figure backlit by the failing amber lights; visible strings of sparks rolling along her shoulders, and shooting from her short spiky hair; she raises her long knife and it crackles with electricity as well. Even as I look, and as Stokes grabs my arm, to pull me toward Yezget Bey and escape, against the rumbling snarl of the black cloud, and the red eyes glinting within it, I hear Rina’s war-cry, and she launches herself in a superhuman leap like a cat, falling through the air down the aisle of the carriage toward the Thing that is pursuing us.

I shriek, her name tearing at my throat, and at that moment comes the loudest crack of lightning of all, deafening in its volume and blinding in its brightness.

And the carriage explodes.