“I believe you were acquainted with a friend of mine,” the man says. There is venom in his smile. “He went by many names, but you knew him as Dr. Golan.”
the horrible cloud-mouth
a woman writhing in the grass
The images surge into my mind with sudden blunt force. I shuffle backward until I hit a sliding glass door. The man is removing something from his pocket as he comes forward. A small black box with metal fangs.
“Turn around,” he commands.
I am suddenly aware that there is a great deal at risk, and that I need to defend myself. So I make myself docile, raise my hands as if in surrender, and when he comes close I bring my fists down on his face.
He shouts as his glasses fly off. The eyes behind them are shining blank eggs burrowed into his skull, and they have murder in them. There’s a loud snap as blue light arcs between the fangs in his black box.
He throws himself at me.
I feel a shock, a singe as he tasers me through my shirt, and I fly back against the glass door. Somehow it doesn’t shatter.
He is on top of me. I hear the whine of the taser recycling. I try to fling him off, but I am still recharging, too, and still weak. Pain rockets through my shoulder, my head.
And then he jerks and lets out a scream and goes limp, and I feel something warm running down my neck.
I am bleeding. (Am I bleeding?)
The man grasps at something and falls away from me. The something has a bronze hilt and protrudes six inches from his neck.
And now there is a strange new darkness behind him, a living shadow, and out of it flashes a hand that picks up my grandfather’s heavy ashtray and smashes the man in the head with it.
He groans and collapses. A girl steps out of the shadow.
The girl—the one from Before—long black hair tangled and wet with rain, long black coat smeared with earth, deep black eyes wide and fearful, searching my face and then sparking with recognition. And though all the pieces haven’t surfaced yet, and though my mind is reeling, I know that what’s happening is a miracle: that we are alive, and we are here, and not in the other place.
my God
such horrors I can hardly name them
The girl is on the floor with me now, kneeling, embracing me. My arms encircle her neck like a life preserver. Her body is so cold, and I can feel her trembling as we hold on to one another.
Without slackening she says my name. Repeats it again and again, and with each reprise the Now gains an ounce more weight, grows more solid.
“Jacob, Jacob. Can you remember me?”
The man on the floor groans. The aluminum bones of the porch screen groan, and the storm, the angry weather we seem to have brought with us from the other place, groans, too.
And I begin to remember.
“Noor,” I say. “Noor. You’re Noor.”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
In a flash, it all came to me. We had survived. Had escaped V’s collapsing loop. And now we were in Florida, on the green Astroturf of my grandfather’s porch, in the present.
Shock. I think I was still in shock.
We huddled together on the floor, gripping one another as the storm raged, until the tremors racking our bodies began to subside. The man in the yellow raincoat lay unmoving, save the diminishing rise and fall of his chest. Blood soaked the Astroturf around him in a sticky pool. The bronze handle of the weapon Noor had stabbed him with protruded from his neck.
“That was my grandfather’s letter opener,” I said. “And this was his house.”
“Your grandfather.” She pulled away, just far enough to look at me. “Who lived in Florida?”
I nodded. Thunder cracked, rattled the walls. Noor was looking around, shaking her head doubtfully. This can’t be real. I knew just how she felt.
“How?” she said.
I gestured to the burned outline on the floor. “I woke up there. No idea how long I was out for. Or what day it is, even.”
Noor rubbed her eyes. “My head’s all fuzzy. Everything’s out of order.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
She frowned, concentrating. “We went to my old apartment. And then we were driving . . .” She spoke slowly, as if piecing together a dream. “And we were in a loop . . . we found V’s loop! And we were running from a storm. No, a tornado.”
“Two tornadoes, wasn’t it?”
“And then we found her! Didn’t we? We found her!” Her hands grabbed mine and squeezed. “And then . . .”
Her hands went slack, her face blank. Her lips parted, but no words came. The horrors were returning, crashing over her.
Over me, too.
Murnau. Knife in hand, crouched above V in the grass. His arm raised in triumph as he ran toward the whirling maelstrom.
Heat flooded my chest, blocked my breathing for a moment. Noor buried her face between her knees and began to rock. “Oh my God,” she moaned. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” I thought she might dissolve before my eyes, or burst into flame, or suck the light from the room.
But after a moment she jerked her head up. “Why aren’t we dead?”
A shudder rattled through me, involuntary.
Maybe we are.
For all I knew, we’d been crushed by V’s collapsing loop, just as Caul had intended. Noor herself seemed the only concrete evidence that what I was experiencing now was more than just some purgatorial memory hole, the last-gasp fireworks of a dying brain.
No—I chased away the thought—we were here, and we were alive.
“She got us out somehow,” I said. “Got us here.”
“Through some kind of emergency exit. An eject button.” Noor was nodding and kneading her hands. “It’s the only explanation.”
To my grandfather’s house—the home of her mentor, her boss. He trained her, worked side by side with her. It made enough sense. What made no sense was that there wasn’t a loop here. So how had she done it?
“If she got us out,” Noor said, “maybe she got herself out, too.” There was hope in her voice, but it was manic, balanced on a knife’s edge. “She could be here. And she could still be . . .”
She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. Alive.
“He took her heart,” I said quietly.
“You can live without a heart. For a little while, anyway . . .” She waved her hand. The hand was shaking.
We had only just regained our grip on reality, and already she was losing it again.