Corridor (Windrose Chronicles)

  CORRIDOR

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Copyright 2011 Barbara Hambly

  Cover art by Eric Baldwin

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  Table of Contents

  Corridor

  About The Author

  The Further Adventures

  Corridor

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  “What is that?” Angryg Windrose, exiled Archmage of the High Council of Wizards, slid out of the car and walked to the top of the concrete embankment, graying curls ruffled by a stirring of smoggy wind. “Where is this place?”

  Joanna Sheraton levered the Mustang into Park and pulled the hand-brake. Was it safer to leave the vehicle unlocked in case they had to make a hasty getaway? In this part of Los Angeles, God knew what would come along while their backs were turned…. “It’s the railroad tracks.” She locked the door, slammed it, and hastened her steps to reach his side. An angular six feet three, Antryg could outdistance her even when he moseyed. “Union Station is about a mile north of here—” Invisible behind the dirty maze of rusted boxcars parked on weed-grown sidings, the hill-high piles of spare railroad ties and old car-tires. She’d explained to him about railroads, which he’d said his own world – parallel to hers, somewhere in the darkness of the Void – was just beginning to develop. “And that’s the river down there. This is not a good part of town.”

  “It’s not a good part of the world.” His round spectacle-lenses flashed in the gray November light as he turned his head, brows drawn together as if striving to catch some sound below the thin whine of the wind as it keened along the vast gray ditch of the Los Angeles River – paved forty years previously in the 1940s and crossed, a few hundred feet south of where they stood, by massive freeway overpasses that added to the surreal bleakness of the scene. “What is that?”

  “You mean the smell?” The wide corridor of wasteland in riverbed and railroad-yards stretched for miles below the station, weed-grown and haunted by the homeless discards of her own society: addicts, illegal immigrants, burned-out vets unable to fit themselves back into jobs after a war that had ended a dozen years before, and the mentally unstable whom cash-strapped hospitals had declared well enough to be outpatients and released onto the streets (Thank you, President Reagan.) These camped in the storm-drains and under the freeways, and the mingled stench of piss and broken liquor-bottles, though damped by rain earlier in the week, was noticeable even from the top of the embankment. Something moved behind a box-car to her left. She hoped it was only a coyote or a rat.

  She had never been more glad of Antryg’s curious ability to be unnoticed.

  “No, the… the…” He gestured with his crooked-fingered hands, as if trying to pluck something from the polluted air, then turned to regard her with those wide, slightly demented gray eyes. “Don’t you feel it?”

  Joanna shook her head.

  “Ah.” His expression changed to genuine worry. “Oh, dear.”

  *

  Joanna had never liked this part of Los Angeles. She’d driven through it or past it hundreds of times, as her expertise with computer systems – and the growing number of computer-line communications networks – had increased her clientele of businesses that needed software assistance. There were five times as many computers in use now as there’d been when she’d started deisgning systems back in 1980. By 1990, God knew what the market would be. Aside from the issues of traffic, parking, and crowding that plagued the teeming “districts” to the south and west – jewelry, fabrics, cut-rate garments from the sweat-shops stacked in those tall grim buildings – she didn’t mind Downtown, but the tracks along the river were different. The trucks came and went along Alameda Street in the early morning, but after that, the whole long swathe of deserted warehouses and barren lots gave her the creeps. At barely five feet tall, she knew herself incapable of dealing with an attack, and never in her life had she seen a cop or a security guard in this area.

  It was not a part of town where a woman – or anyone with any money at all on them – had any business being.

  And the look in her companion’s eyes told her that though he was probably well aware of this – Antryg was completely daft but not stupid – this was not the source of his concern.

  And that did bother her.

  A chain-link fence supposedly guarded the verge of the river’s concrete embankment. It had been cut, and rudely bent back into a semblance of its original shape, but Antryg simply lifted the cut portion aside and ducked through. The stink of excrement and vomit was stronger here. It was late in the day. From the freeways the steady, metallic rushing of cars was growing louder, a reminder – Joanna’s mind snagged on the longtime Angelino’s constant preoccupation – that it was getting on for the hour when anyone who could do so, had better get the hell out of Downtown if they didn’t want to spend the next two hours sitting in locked-down traffic. From his jeans pocket Antryg drew a hand-made cardboard thaumatrope, hooked his fingers through the strings, and set the little disk spinning. There was a bird-cage drawn on one side, but where the bird would be on the other – on all the thaumatropes Joanna had seen as a child – there was nothing.

  As Antryg was perfectly willing to tell anyone who asked, though he was a powerful wizard in his own universe (he said), he had no magic here, and had to rely on other sources of information.

  It was a credit to his earnest charm and friendly nature that most people – including his therapist – accepted this explanation with little more than “Oh. Okay.”

  Tires crunched, somewhere among the boxcars and debris behind them. Joanna heard men’s’ voices, snatches of Spanish. Quiet. Wary of being heard.

  Just what we need. A run-in with drug-dealers.

  Can I buy our way out of this with a promise to fix their computer?

  At the same moment, from down in the dry river-bed, a man’s voice rose in a wordless howl, a harsh ululation of pain and despair and a madness that might or might not have had anything to do with the consumption of raw wood-alcohol.

  But like the coyote in the hills that surrounded LA, the howl was answered by others, beneath the bridges or in the outfall-pipes, screams like the wailing of the damned.

  Antryg moved a step down the cracked concrete slope, and Joanna closed her hand hard on his wrist. “Can we get out of here?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied disconcertingly. “I think we should certainly try. Are you feeling all right?”

  “I have a headache,” she said – a not uncommon reaction when one wasn’t able to get on the 101 Freeway outbound before 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon.

  *

  On the way home – and it did indeed take them two hours and fifteen minutes to make it back to Granada Hills – it crossed Joanna’s mind two or three times to ask her companion, What did YOU feel down there by the tracks? But between the excruciating pounding in her skull, and the antics of the two million other drivers attempting to get from the 110 Freeway onto the 101, she never managed to phrase the question. There wasn’t even a possibility of getting Antryg to drive, always supposing they’d been able to pull over to the shoulder (had there been a shoulder that wasn’t blocked with highway construction). Being a wizard from another universe made Antryg Windrose a hugely entertaining lover and friend, but it meant that he hadn’t the slightest idea what to do be
hind the wheel of a car.

  By the time they reached 75313 Porson Avenue – a down-at-heels Craftsman bungalow, the oldest house on the street by many decades, planted incongruously between two already-shabby ‘sixties developments – Joanna wanted nothing except the bedroom’s quiet darkness.

  Sleeping, she dreamed.

  Dreamed of a sound, a thin, high keening that seemed to drill through the sutures of her skull, dissolving them like a laser to pierce the brain-tissue within. In the darkness just beneath the bedroom ceiling, tiny creatures whirled and sparkled, like the blown-glass skeletons of fairies: ragamummages, Antryg called them. The things that cats saw in the twilight, harmless and invisible to human perceptions. Only now she saw them, hundreds of them, and sure enough, Spock and Chainsaw, sitting on the bed – as usual separated by as much distance as possible – stared up at them, golden eyes dilated in the dark.

  But at Joanna’s movement they turned their eyes towards her. And their eyes had changed, not golden but blood-red, and their long whiskers were tipped with blood. They’re possessed, Joanna realized in terror. At a certain hour of the night, demons come into them, and they kill – Who would suspect innocent cats?

  Panic seized her, with the certainty that their poisoned bite spread the evil, opened the corpses of those they had torn to possession by other demons. Her head was splitting with pain, but the simple obviousness of the plague nearly blinded her. Cautiously she rolled from the bed, tiptoed toward the window, beside which Antryg’s sword stood, propped in its scabbard: an antique samurai blade, given him by their old aikido instructor, who also taught the deadlier arts of its use. Antryg knows, she thought. He’ll understand…

  She wondered if the cats would die when she struck them, or if merely the demon would leave them. I have to strike fast, before they realize I know.

  She slid the blade from its sheathe, an oiled, deadly whisper. Turned back toward the bed…

  “Joanna—”

  He came from behind her, put one hand on her sword-wrist and the other on her shoulder.

  He’s been bitten, she realized in panic, he’s possessed as well!

  She swung around, blade ready—

  “Joanna.”

  His grip tightened and she woke, with a sensation of falling.

  She stood in his arms in the dark bedroom, the sword naked in her hand.

  Spock and Chainsaw whipped down off the bed and streaked through the door and down the stairs as she dropped the blade in shock: Antryg caught it with effortless lightness.

  The crawling purple darkness of the dream was once more ordinary night and streetlamp glow.

  The pain in her skull became ordinary, pounding pain.

  She stared at him, disoriented, eyes filling with tears – I could have killed them! I WOULD have killed them… and he set the weapon on the end of the bed, out of her reach, and put both hands on the sides of her head.

  The pain lessened at once. He looked into her eyes, said something – she never afterwards remembered what – and the agony was gone.

  “It’s all right,” he added.

  She caught his wrists, her balance momentarily deserting her. Remembered how real it had seemed, the reflecting blood-red zombie-light in the eyes of the cats, in Antryg’s eyes as well. “It’s all right,” he repeated.

  “I sleepwalked.” She struggled to free herself from the after-images of the dream. The recollection of what it had felt like, to be ready to kill. She shook the leonine ruffle of her blonde hair from her eyes, looked back at the curved steel lying across the muted darks and lights of the bed-quilt. “I was going to kill them.” She realized she was trembling. “Spock, and Chainsaw –“

  “But you didn’t.” He steered her back to the bed. The pain in her skull was gone but her head felt strange, as if her skull were made of something other than bone.

  “It was so real.” Joanna sat down among the blankets creased and pressed where she’d lain in her evening nap. Through the open window she could hear their down-the-street neighbors talking, so it couldn’t be terribly late…

  “They were possessed by demons or something and I really would have hurt them—”

  “Well, they’re pretty fast,” he said. “And I wouldn’t have let you.” He took the sword and sheathed it again, returned it to its place. Her own sword – a regular, unsharpened training katana – and his training sword as well, stood near-by. The fact that she’d gone straight for the lethal blade shook her to the heart, as if everything she had learned since meeting Antryg, nearly eighteen months ago now – first aid, and the handling of weapons, and the exhausting joys of combat sports – had become a deadly mockery, the irresponsible obsession of the delusional which could turn dangerous at the whisper in a dream.

  “But what if you hadn’t been here?”

  He sat next to her, the round lenses of his glasses catching the light. “But I was,” he pointed out.

  “Were you expecting me to do that?”

  “I was expecting something. I’ve been sitting here next to you for two hours.” He nodded toward the footboard of the bed, where a couple of comic-books attested to the truth of his statement. Although Antryg claimed that no magic existed in this universe, Joanna had long ago observed that he still had no trouble seeing – and reading – in complete darkness, and, wizard-like, would wander around the house without bothering to turn on any lights. What people – including herself – heard him speak was more and more frequently actual English, as his skills in that language increased, instead of the Ferryth tongue telepathically translated, but he still found reading more than simple English a challenge.

  Sometimes he seemed to be under the impression that there really were plant elementals, with the minds and hearts of living men in them, that fought galactic evil….

  And he had yet to explain why no one ever stole his bicycle, no matter where he left it unlocked.

  “What was that, down in the river-bed?” she asked after a time. “What did you see? What did you hear? There was a sound,” she added. “In my dream… Only it wasn’t really a sound. It was like light. Burning light.”

  He said softly, “Ah.”

  “And I saw mummages!” she added, and looked up at the ceiling. The ragamummages were gone.

  Or were invisible to her again.

  “Did you?” He smiled; she’d wanted to be able to see them ever since he’d told her of their existence. “What color were they?”

  “All colors,” said Joanna immediately. “Bright reds, bright blues, iridescent green – there were hundreds of them. I thought you said mummages were transparent like glass.”

  “They are,” said Antryg gently, “after they’ve lived in this universe for a few years. The ones hatched in this world are transparent. But when they first come through the Void they’re brilliantly colored, and only fade with time.” When they died, he’d once explained, their skeletons became visible as dust-kittens under the beds.

  Joanna thought about that. “That means someone opened a Gate in the Void, doesn’t it? That’s why there were so many bright-colored ones—”

  “It looks that way, yes.”

  “Is that what was down in the river?” Ragamummages, Joanna well knew, were the least dangerous things that came through the Void between universes when a Gate opened. The spells that let a wizard cross from one world to the next frequently triggered worm-holes, sometimes miles away.

  “No.” A corner of Antryg’s mouth flexed downward. “Unfortunately. I haven’t the smallest idea what’s going on down in the river-bed… Yet.”

  Joanna said, “You’re telling me we have to go back.”

  “I have to go back. You—”

  “I’m not staying behind.”

  *

  In her dream she heard the sound again. It couldn’t touch her, because of what Antryg had said to her, but she was aware of it, like the whining of a mosquito heard from the safety of an enclosing net. But it filled the concrete wasteland of the river-bed and train
-yards. Somewhere a man was screaming, high-pitched wailing like that she’d heard that afternoon. It was hard to see, but she thought there were four or five sleepers in a shelter made of railroad ties and part of a car, men wrapped in dirty blankets; she could smell the filth of their bodies, the stale reek of the tobacco that was their only defense against hunger. One man gasped and sat up, stared around him at his companions with the unseeing eyes of a sleepwalker… Oh, shit! He sees them the way I saw the cats.

  He sees their eyes red and filled with demon-light, and it makes sense to him that he has to kill them…

  She tried to scream at the other sleepers, Wake up!

  The sleepwalker fumbled around him in the dark, found something metal and sharp, a can-lid, Joanna thought. It cut his own hand as he grabbed it but he didn’t notice and didn’t wake.

  Wake up!

  He rolled up to all fours, began to crawl toward the nearest sleeper, the noise getting louder and louder, as if focusing itself from a knife-blade to a scalpel’s terrifying sharpness.

  WAKE UP!

  She couldn’t stay to see what happened next, wrenched herself away from the blackness of that pitiful shelter. She saw the river-bed outside, and Yes, she thought, I don’t care what Antryg says…

  Shimmering blackness, vertiginous skeletal light hung in the air beside the polluted river-channel. A worm-hole through the Void. Someone’s opening a Gate.

  I have to warn Antryg…

  She woke breathless, crushed by panic that dispersed at once like mist. Chainsaw slept curled up against her, Spock on the pillow by her head. Evidently all was forgiven. It was cloudy-gray daylight. Through the open bedroom door she smelled coffee, and heard voices downstairs.

  “I took a taxi,” said a man’s voice, rich and beautiful and – Joanna realized – familiar…

  Where the hell did you find a TAXI in Los Angeles? She pulled one of Antryg’s shirts off the back of the nearest chair – she’d changed into pajamas before going back to bed last night – and went downstairs.