The walls were changing. In places the stones had been replaced by great dark green blocks of glass. Within their depths, fat black tendrils swirled and swarmed. One rushed at us and its headless front folded open, becoming a mouth. Eris gave a weak scream. Radar was now walking so close beside me that my leg brushed her side at every step.
We finally emerged in a great vaulted room of dark green glass. The black tendrils were everywhere in the walls, darting in and out of strange carved shapes that changed when you looked at them. They curved and twisted, made shapes… faces…
“Don’t look at those things,” I told Eris. I guessed Leah already knew; if she had remembered how to get here, she would surely remember those weird, changing shapes. “I think they’ll hypnotize you.”
Leah was standing in the center of this gruesome nave, looking around, bewildered. It was ringed with passages, each pulsing with green light. There had to be at least a dozen of them.
“I don’t think I can,” Eris said. Her voice was a trembling whisper. “Charlie, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can.”
“You don’t have to.” The sound of my voice was flat and strange, I think because of the humming. It sounded like the voice of the Charlie Reade who’d gone along with every dirty trick the Bird Man thought up… and then added some of his own. “Go back, if you can find your way. Stay here and wait for us if you can’t.”
Leah turned a complete circle, doing it slowly and looking at each passage in turn. Then she looked at me, raised her hands, and shook her head.
I don’t know.
“This is as far as you went, isn’t it? Elden went on from here without you.”
Yes.
“But eventually he came back.”
Yes.
I thought of her waiting here in this strange green chamber with the weird carvings and the black things dancing in the walls. A little girl holding steady—holding resolute—in spite of that insidious hum. Waiting here alone.
“Did you come with him other times?”
Yes. Then pointed up, which I didn’t understand.
“After that, did he come without you?”
A long pause… then: Yes.
“And there came a time when he didn’t come back.”
Yes.
“You didn’t go after him, did you? Maybe this far but no further. You didn’t dare.”
She covered her face. It was answer enough.
“I’m going,” Eris blurted. “I’m sorry, Charlie, but I… I can’t.”
She fled. Radar went after her to the entrance we’d emerged from, and if she’d gone with Eris, I wouldn’t have called her back. The hum was invading my bones now. I had a strong premonition that neither Princess Leah nor I were ever going to see the world outside again.
Radar returned to me. I knelt and put an arm around her, taking what comfort I could.
“You assumed your brother was dead.”
Yes. Then she clasped her throat and guttural words emerged in front of her. “Is dead. Is.”
The self I had become—was still becoming—was older and wiser than the high school kid who had emerged in that field of poppies. This Charlie—Prince Charlie—understood that Leah had to believe that. Otherwise the guilt of not trying to rescue him would have been too great to bear.
Yet I think by then she knew better.
6
The floor was polished green glass that seemed to go down to endless depths. The black things swarmed beneath us, and there was no way to doubt that they were hungry. No dust here and not a single track. If they had left any, a member of Flight Killer’s coterie had wiped them away just in case someone—us, for instance—tried to follow. With Leah unable to remember, there was no way to tell which of the twelve passages they’d taken.
Or maybe there was.
I remembered the woman with the beauty mark beside her mouth shouting Kneel, old blood! Kneel, old blood! Petra was her name, and she had been wearing a green silk dress.
I retrieved the scrap I’d found and held it out to Radar, who sniffed it without much interest—the hum and the black shapes in the glass blocks were affecting her, too. But she was what I had. What we had.
“Which one?” I said, and pointed to the tunnels. She didn’t move, only looked up at me, and I realized the terrible atmosphere of this place had made me stupid. There were commands she understood, but which one wasn’t among them. I held the scrap of dress to her nose again. “Find, Radar, find!”
This time she lowered her nose to the floor. One of those black shapes seemed to leap at her and she danced back, but then she put her nose down again—my good dog, my brave dog. She went toward one of the tunnels, backtracked, and went to the next one on the right. Then she turned to me and barked.