To the Vanishing Point

18

Having come so far the hard way, they all sat and stared for a long time. Even the motor home seemed to idle easier.

"What happens when we get there?" Wendy finally asked, breaking the silence. "Do we vanish, too?"

Mouse brought herself back from some faraway place to smile at Wendy. "No. It is the insubstantials that disappear at that place. Space, time, reality: that’s what a vanishing point is all about. It’s where everything goes when it’s not here, a place all its own, at once a part of yet outside the real cosmos. It’s the focus of real and of time."

"What do we do when we get there?" Alicia wondered.

"It is where the Spinner lives, weaving the fabric of reality. Presently it lies uneasy, as does reality itself. By soothing it we shall regulate its spinning and thereby restore reason to the worlds around us. I will sing to it and it will be healed." She paused. "At least, that is what I hope will happen."

"Then we’d better hurry and get there." Frank resumed his cautious advance up the streambed.

Ever since they’d left the beach, strange muted sounds had been coming from the vicinity of the rear bedroom. Now they were joined by a sharp metallic odor. He had to speak without taking his gaze from their path, but he couldn’t restrain his curiosity any longer.

"What’s goin' on back there? Where’s Burnfingers?"

Flucca piped up from his seat halfway back. "Working, I think. In the bedroom."

"Working on what?" Alicia’s nose wrinkled as she inhaled the acrid odor. "Smells like something’s burning."

"Ask him what he’s doing," Frank snapped.

Flucca slid off his seat and headed rearward. The door opened slightly at his call. Frank could see him whispering to Burnfingers. After a couple of minutes the door shut and Flucca came forward.

"Some kind of ceremony he’s into. Says he can’t be disturbed. He’s not burning anything up."

"Well, if he’s not doing anything dangerous then I guess it’s okay," Alicia said dubiously. Frank grunted. If Burnfingers was up to something peculiar they could hardly stop him by force.

The stink from the back grew worse as they climbed the gently sloping, rapidly narrowing valley. Once Wendy tried to peek in on Burnfingers, only to discover that he’d locked the door from the other side. Frank wasn’t thrilled with all the secrecy. What did they know, really know, about Burnfingers Begay, anyway? He’d confessed to madness. Was he going to try and prove it somehow?

He tried to concentrate on the road and ignore whatever was happening in his bedroom. It wasn’t difficult, given the congeniality of the surroundings. Exotic blooms and brilliantly hued growths of every description crowded close around the streambed. Orchids hung from trees and insects darted in and out of trumpet-shaped blossoms the color of children’s laughter. Vines wore coats of tiny purple flowers. In its way the valley was the exact antithesis of the first alternate reality they’d stumbled into. Instead of fire and brimstone they drove past crimson and yellow blooms.

Wendy spoke up excitedly. "Look, Mom: hummingbirds!"

Frank took his eye off their course long enough to spot the tiny, metallic-hued creatures as they darted among the leaves and branches like winged crystals. In a short while they were enveloped by them. It was like driving through a giant beehive, so sonorous was the beating of thousands of wings. He’d never heard of hummingbirds living in dense flocks.

But as the little fliers drew near it wasn’t their myriad colors that provoked murmurs of awe from the occupants of the motor home. That was reserved for the ones who rode them.

They were people, or human, anyway. Though little larger than a thumbnail, each was perfectly formed in every detail. They clung tight to hummingbird reins and secured their feet in hummingbird stirrups. A few carried harps and other miniature musical instruments. Frank wondered how they could hear them over the beat of so many wings. They were almost too tiny to think of as little people. He could see them talking to one another in voices that were less than squeaks.

It took him a moment to realize that they weren’t talking. They were singing, and Mouse was singing with them. She’d opened a window and her face was against the screen. He could see her lips move but, strain as he might, could not overhear a single word.

Only when she straightened and rejoined them did Alicia ask the question. "Who are they? They’re precious!"

"They wouldn’t think so." Dozens of hummers and riders were darting back and forth in front of the glass. "This is their home. They live on the tip of the Vanishing Point. We’re related a little, because they, too, are musicians. For them a ballad lasts only seconds, a cantata a few minutes, an epic less than one of your hours. They’ve sung like that since the beginning of time. They cannot share with others because their music is as intense as their lives. Too much for people like us to handle." She turned and gestured back the way they’d come, back down the streambed.

"The other inhabitants of this land suspect their existence and have told tales about them for centuries. Most people do not believe in the tiny ones, which suits them well. They like their valley the way it is. Visitors, even friendly ones, would despoil it and interfere with the music."

"What land are you talking about? Where are we, anyway? Besides close to the Vanishing Point, I mean."

"What lies behind us no longer matters. All that matters is what lies ahead. Have a care from now on for what exists beyond reality." She lowered her voice. "The crucial time approaches. We must be careful lest this changes, too."

"This?" Alicia was all but nose-to-nose with a dozen hummers and their exquisite, perfectly formed riders. They hovered outside her window, easily keeping pace with the motor home. "This couldn’t change. This is too beautiful."

"It is exactly that, which is why so few people have seen it. But there are no absolutes in the cosmos, Alicia. Truth and Beauty exist because people invent them. When a tree falls in the forest it makes a sound whether anyone is present to hear it or not, but it is not beautiful unless someone is there to look upon it."

Frank tried to drive around a good-sized rock, failed and winced as a tire kicked it up under the chassis. "Just so long as you’re right about us being close. I’m tired of ending up on highways to nowhere."

Mouse nodded ahead. "We are almost there. Thanks to you, Frank Sonderberg, I think everything is going to be all right."

He glanced back toward the rear bedroom. "If Charlie doesn’t burn us down or blow us up first."

"He’s talking to his yeibichais."

"What?"

"His spirits, his gods. I’ve known for some time he’s not alone back there. They’re all working on something together. He doesn’t want you back there because he knows you couldn’t handle what you might see. I gather it’s a very sensitive business."

"So you don’t know what he’s up to, either?"

She shook her head. "I trust Burnfingers Begay. He’s an unusual man, besides being a Traveler."

It was harder than ever for Frank to keep his mind on his driving. "Hardly enough room back there for two people, let alone a bunch of gods."

"There are large gods and small gods, and the proportion of them has nothing at all to do with physical size. I think Burnfingers’s gods are very big indeed."

The canyon walls closed in around them until for the second time that day there was barely enough room for the motor home to pass between them. The narrow passage was suffused with an eerie, slightly orange sunlight. Vines and orchids, ferns and palms vanished, leaving only the cold stone. Frank edged the motor home forward, finding he missed the comforting hum of the birds and their riders. This was a place where a song was needed, even one he couldn’t hear.

There was a sharp spang as the sideview mirror on the passenger side was snapped off by protruding rock. Frank cursed, corrected imperceptibly to the left. Alicia rose to put a comforting arm around her daughter, who didn’t like enclosed places.

If they wedged themselves in here, Frank told himself as he sweated the drive, they’d never be able to back up.

Overhead, the walls of the canyon towered hundreds, maybe thousands of feet toward the sky. Then suddenly they opened up, parting, literally falling away on both sides. Frank breathed a sigh of relief as they rolled out onto a wide, flat plateau covered with bright green grass and inch-wide yellow flowers. He decided the latter were close cousins to dandelions.

"Stop," Mouse quietly instructed him. "Stop here."

Frank put the motor home in park, turned to look back at the cleft from which they’d emerged. Surely it was far too narrow to have passed the Winnebago. At the far end of the slit of a canyon the light was faint and hazy. It was like looking toward another world.

"This is it," Mouse was saying. "We’ve done it. We’re here." She strode past Wendy and her mother to open the door. Frank hastened to follow.

Now that the engine was off, they could hear it clearly: a vast sighing, the rush of immense bellows — Eternity breathing. Mouse was walking through the grass and yellow flowers toward the edge of the plateau. Beyond lay turquoise sky. With each step tiny black things jumped out of her path and the flowers inclined curious heads toward her ankles.

The Sonderbergs followed, along with Niccolo Flucca. Frank held his wife’s hand. As they neared the drop-off, Alicia sucked in her breath and Wendy gasped. Flucca murmured something inadequate in a foreign language.

The Spinner hung in the bright blue air, stretching to infinity. Clouds broke against the unending golden body. Some were tinged with red, others with yellow. Lightning flickered beneath the Spinner’s epidermis, which was not skin but something indefinable. As the body rippled like a long Chinese kite, thousands of legs busily twisted and worked against one another. From each pair of legs a silklike thread emerged, to drift off into immensity. The sky surrounding the Spinner was full of rippling silvery mats, and reflected in each could be seen entire worlds, whole universes. Each thread was a different reality, and there were thousands upon thousands of realities.

Anyone could see something was amiss. Holes showed in some of the mats, and in places there were no mats at all where proximate threads had been broken or become entangled. There the spinning legs jerked spasmodically, uncertainly. Realities became entwined, or roped together. There was great confusion, but not chaos. Not yet.

Though Mouse had referred to it as such, Frank hadn’t really expected the Spinner to be an actual creature. Somewhere in the archives of man there was doubtless a creation myth, which got it right. If so, it was one he’d never heard.

"Behold the Spinner," Mouse instructed them, one arm lifted gracefully in its direction.

Two eyes stared blankly from the near end of the immensity.

They were an impossible distance away. Distance had no meaning here. The gap might be measurable in miles — or in light-years. Each orb was a limpid blue sea the size of Lake Superior. The Spinner hung in cloud-stuff far away and below the rim of the plateau on which they stood. Frank cautiously looked over and down. If there was a bottom, it could not be seen.

"It’s clear that it’s ill." Mouse pointed out the rips in the fabric of existence, the broken threads with which legs toyed helplessly. "It suffers from an emotional instability that will only become worse — unless I can soothe it with song. Even something as great as the Spinner can suffer." She turned to Wendy. "If you wouldn’t mind, dear child, I will need a really big glass of water."

"Okay, sure!" Wendy turned and dashed back to the motor home. When she returned with the glass, Mouse took a long swallow of the contents before handing it back. Wendy stepped aside without having to be asked.

Suddenly Mouse seemed taller, stronger. She cleared her throat once, twice, while resting both hands against her lower abdomen. Without appearing to exert much more effort than she had on similar previous occasions, she began to sing.

It was a wordless song, a song of power, and it poured out of her like a torrent in an endless fortissimo. Frank had to put his hands over his ears, and Alicia, too. They listened in awe to the incredible volume of sound issuing from that seemingly frail body. The music was simultaneously calming and exhilarating, reassuring and ennobling, soothing and strength-bestowing.

As they looked over the edge of the plateau, they saw that the rippling movements of the Spinner’s body were becoming more pronounced, like waves traveling across a golden beach. It was starting to move, not in uncertain, hesitant jerks, but smoothly and in time to the rhythm of Mouse’s song.

She sang for a long time, longer than should have been possible, before her lips finally came together again. She wore the strain of the song like a scar on her face as she turned and smiled weakly at Wendy.

"I’ll have another sip, I think." Dumbstruck, the girl handed her the glass.

"Wow — if I only had my tape recorder."

Alicia was taking in the vastness that was the Spinner. "Is that all? I mean it’s over? You fixed it?"

"I do not know."

Frank frowned at her. "Whaddaya mean, you don’t know? After all we’ve been through you mean to say you can’t tell if it’s been worthwhile?"

"I believe I have stabilized it some, but not completely. Did you think this would be so easily done?" She passed the water back to Wendy. "I must continue. It is not finished."

Throwing back her head, she let loose an entirely new and different tsunami of sound. The irresistible musical avalanche swept out from the plateau to wash the place the Spinner lived. This time it seemed to have no effect. The expression Mouse wore when she concluded the song showed she was not pleased.

"Still not there. Something is wrong and I know not what."

"I do."

Surprised, they all turned. Burnfingers Begay regarded them, proud and exhausted. Sweat streaked his face and his black hair lay flat against his skin. In his right hand he held a two-foot-long golden cylinder that glowed with internal fire.

Alicia stared at it in amazement. "Where did you ever find that?"

"Did not find it. Made it. In your bedroom." He grinned at Frank. "With your hobby tools, my friend."

"What the hell is it?"

Burnfingers held it up so the clouds could have a good look at what he had wrought, like a father proffering his newborn son for approval.

"It is a flute. The flute."

"Doesn’t look like any kind of flute I ever saw," Frank replied uncertainly.

"It is not the kind of flute you would find in a symphony orchestra. This is a Native American flute. The best kind of flute. From it comes the music of prairie and grass, of butte and sandstone, of the wind and the waters. This flute will breathe Four Corners music." His eyes glittered; perhaps with his madness, perhaps with something else.

"I made it out of the gold I have saved and collected. Gold of Spanish doubloons and Colombia and the Yucatan. Gold from the Andes and the Sierra Nevada. Gold from the shallows of Brazil’s rivers and from great museums where I have worked and studied."

"You stole it?" Alicia asked him.

"Stole it?" He lowered the unique instrument to regard her intently. "I did not steal it. I liberated it. This is piece and fragment of all the gold the white men have ever stolen from the Amerindian, from the tundra to the plains of Patagonia. I did not know at the time why I liberated it except that it made me feel good to do so." His gaze rose, to settle on Mouse. "Then I met the little singer and learned of her journey, and I knew what I would do with the gold when the time came for it to be of use.

"When I told you that I was crazy you should have guessed I was a musician."

Mouse was nodding knowingly, like one who’d just found the missing piece of the puzzle under her chair. "And I thought you were only a Traveler."

"All musicians are travelers, but not all Travelers are musicians," he replied merrily. The glint in his eyes had become a twinkling. "It takes more than the right song to soothe the Spinner. It takes the proper accompaniment." And putting the gleaming flute to his lips, he began to play.

So Mouse, inspired, sang a third song, and they all knew it was the best yet, better than ever before. But when it was done she declared herself still unsatisfied, and the Spinner, though obviously much improved, still heaved and buckled alarmingly.

"Still something absents itself." She was thinking hard, staring at the ground. "Burnfingers Begay, your music has helped much, but I fear it is not enough." She glanced so sharply at Frank that he twitched, startled. "Frank Sonderberg, can you play an instrument?"

"Who, me? You’ve gotta be kidding. None of us can…"

"Hey, Dad. Dad?"

Father and mother looked at Wendy. Frank readied himself to say something, and then he remembered. Back in the reality that had claimed his son, where each of them had demonstrated a special talent, a unique characteristic, only his daughter had simply sat and stared, displaying nothing. Now here…

"Are you sure, sugar?" He hadn’t called her that in quite a few years. It came back easily and felt good. "I mean, really sure?"

"I can try, Dad."

He nodded, smiled, and indicated the motor home. "Go and get it, then." Eyes shining, she turned and sprinted past Burnfingers Begay.

Frank turned to Mouse unable to vanquish the pride in his voice. "My little girl, when she puts her mind to it, can play the harmonica."

"I don’t know." Begay was doubtful. "It is not a noble instrument."

"The nobility lies in the performer, not the instrument," Mouse informed him. "We must try and hope."

Wendy rejoined them, panting hard. In one hand she held a shiny silver concert harmonica. Next to Burnfingers’s solid-gold flute it didn’t look like much, but Mouse didn’t appear disappointed. She came forward and put both hands on the girl’s shoulders.

"Just listen and try to follow. Let your thoughts flow and be one with the music."

Burnfingers raised the flute to his lips. "Now it is time to let your heart sing."

Wendy nodded. "I’m ready." She put the instrument to her lips.

It was not what Frank normally thought of as music, when he thought of it at all. The golden flute was akin to bubbles in champagne while his daughter’s harmonica sounded more like the foam atop beer. Somehow it all came together, carried forward by the power of Mouse’s song. And enveloping them and adding to it all was the almost palpable projection of maternal affection and warmth that emanated once more from Alicia.

Frank looked on and listened, and much as he was amazed by it all he discovered he was feeling very left out.

A tug at his arm made him look down. Flucca stood there. "Don’t let it get to you, mate. Me, I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket." He winked. It shouldn’t have made Frank feel better, but it did. He straightened as he turned back to the improbable concert.

The Spinner was reacting. Bursts of sun-sized lightning now ran not only along its back but through its entire body. Legs, which had been twisting and jerking against one another, gradually relaxed until they resumed weaving in unison. The alignment commenced near the head and spread slowly toward the unimaginably distant horizon. As he looked on, the gaps and rips in the silvery mats that formed the fabric of innumerable reality lines began to close up. The image that resulted was one of vast beauty and regimentation. Frank felt an overwhelming sense of peace and contentment.

Mouse’s voice was the soothing strength, the cool sound of Burnfingers’s flute was her support, and Wendy — Wendy’s herky-jerky harmonica provided an odd sort of harmonic glue that bound the whole together. The resonance of reason, he thought, marveling that his own daughter could be a contributor to such an endeavor.

So entranced was he by the performance and the effect it was having on the Spinner that he was unaware he was rocking back and forth in time to the music. Unaware, that is, until he felt Flucca tugging anxiously on his wrist.

He’d been asleep while awake. Now he frowned down at the smaller man, who turned and pointed back toward the canyon.

The narrow slit of light was no longer visible as a bright dividing line between the towering cliffs. Now only darkness lived there, intensifying as he stared. A rumbling began to sound in his ears, in his bones.

The others noticed it as well. Mouse looked worriedly back over her shoulder even as she continued with her song. Frank didn’t have to ask the significance of the advancing darkness.

Relentlessly pursuing across alternate realities, the Anarchis had finally caught up with them.

"Will she finish the song in time?" he muttered aloud, trying to divide his attention among the trio, his wife, and the oncoming nightmare.

"She has to," said Flucca. "As I understand it, if she’s interrupted before her therapy’s been completed, then all our efforts will have been for nothing. I don’t see how this Anarchis could do harm to anything the size of the Spinner, but it doesn’t have to. All it has to do is stop the healing process."

Frank turned away from the singers to study the canyon that formed the outside tip of the Vanishing Point. Only the narrow confines prevented the Anarchis from advancing faster. It had to compact itself, squeeze down to fit through.

"I guess we’ve got to stop it."

Frank’s lower jaw dropped as he regarded Flucca. "We?" The dwarf was already racing for the motor home. Frank fought to catch up with him. "What are we supposed to do? Throw rocks at it?"

"We have to try something. We have to buy as much time as we can."

"Maybe we can reason with it."

Flucca was shaking his head as he mounted the steps. "Can’t reason with an agent of Chaos. That’s a contradiction in terms."

"The story of my life." He piled in behind the little man.

Flucca scrambled into the passenger’s seat. This time it didn’t feel so good to be sitting behind the wheel, but Frank knew his friend was right. They had to try and slow their unreasoning nemesis, had to give Mouse as much time as possible to complete her work. He wondered if Alicia had seen him leave. The warmth she projected was as vital to the Spinner’s therapy as the music. Just as well if she didn’t notice his absence. But it would’ve been nice to have had a chance to say good-bye.

"Maybe we can slow the damn thing down, or at least give it a bellyache," he growled as he started the engine. "If it doesn’t like reality, a few tons of Detroit iron oughta give it pause."

The wondrous music of the trio continued to reach their ears through the motor home’s walls, raising their spirits as it soothed the Spinner. Frank swung the motor home around, raced the engine, and then slammed his foot on the accelerator. No dragster, the Winnebago picked up speed gradually, but in a couple of minutes it was thundering toward the canyon at a very respectable velocity and gaining more every second. Whatever it struck would know it had been hit.

He wondered if they’d make contact inside the Vanishing Point or out in the real world, and if it would make a difference. His fingers tightened on the wheel. Probably wasn’t his world out there, anyway. In his world the Pacific hadn’t invaded the land and monsters didn’t run rampant in the streets of Los Angeles. Despite the gravity of the moment, he found he could still grin. Not south of Sunset Boulevard they didn’t, anyway.

Flucca kept an eye out for possible obstacles, rocks or logs. There were none on the perfectly flat plateau. There was only grass and flowers, which sprang back with unnatural vigor in the wake of the motor home’s heavy tires.

They could see the Anarchis squeezing through the Vanishing Point, like black toothpaste boiling out of its tube. It was driving a swirling cloud of terrified hummingbirds and little people before it. As they neared the roiling mass, Frank was able to identify individual shapes held tightly within. There were the devils and demons from Hades Junction, off to the side the shifting hulks of the alien thugs who’d tried to steal Burnfingers Begay’s precious gold at Pass Regulus, and behind them the armed and raging mutants from the fringes of a nuked Salt Lake City. Mixed in and among these more familiar evils were the killers and gargoyles, which had frolicked amid an inundated Los Angeles.

It rolled toward them, expanding as it emerged from the canyon. Bulging eyes and barbed tongues flared from its surface, as unstable and everchanging as the Chaos that was its master.

"I’m only sorry you never got the chance to taste my cooking," Flucca murmured solemnly.

"Yeah, me too." Frank closed his eyes. Good-bye, Alicia. Good-bye, Wendy. Good-bye, Steven, wherever you are.

Plowing into the center of the writhing black storm, the motor home scattered teeth and eyeballs, mutants and devils in every direction. Frank’s eyes opened involuntarily, to reveal that they were driving through a substance like thin tar. Then the Anarchis began to recover from the shock of being struck by so much relentless reality. Evil and darkness closed tight around them, thick as molasses. They could no longer hear Mouse’s exhilarating song.

Sly tendrils of night began to ooze into the motor home, seeping through imperfect joints, working their way beneath the weather stripping that lined the windows. The bubble of reality that had held back tons of seawater was unable to halt the invasion.

Frank wrenched at the wheel with one hand as he used the other to swat at the cloying darkness. Maybe they could swing clear and come around for another run. The darkness recoiled from his flailing hand like a live thing, insubstantial tentacles searching for just the right opening. Flucca fought the feral probes with a frying pan.

The motor home rumbled clear of the cloud, evil trailing behind like a clinging black contrail. Swinging around, Frank saw between coughs that they’d slowed but not stopped its advance. Mouse and the others continued with their song as though oblivious to the danger crawling across the plateau toward them.

"Hang on!" Frank yelled.

For a second time they smashed into the storm front that was the Anarchis. This time it was ready for them. Penetration came faster, the tendrils reached for them without hesitation. Frank thought the smoke laughed, a hideous, unpleasant chuckle. Coils of it encircled his arms, then his wrists. Another that had slipped up through the heating elements contracted around the foot he kept resolutely jammed to the accelerator.

He tried to bring the heavy vehicle around for a third attack, but he could feel himself losing control. Hands were firmly disengaged from the wheel as his foot was lifted from the gas pedal. Flucca made a dive for it, only to run headlong into a wall of dark, pulsing smoke.

A thin tendril wrapped itself round his forehead and dipped down to arc up his left nostril. Frank coughed, tried to choke it out, knew instinctively that if it crept down inside it would fill his lungs and throat with unbreathable horror. He cut through it with the edge of one hand only to see it re-form instantly.

The light inside the motor home was going out, together with the light that was his life. He hoped only that he and Flucca had bought the others enough time to complete the work.

Drifting through the darkness came a dinner plate. It had eyes and stripes, though whether it was black with white stripes or black on white he couldn’t tell. Lack of oxygen was impairing his vision. As it drew near he added fins and tail to his final catalogue of proximate observations.

"Impolite," it ventured coolly.

"Quite," said a similar voice.

The three angelfish floated in the center of the motor home. The Anarchis tried to swallow them as it had swallowed the motor home and all its contents. Each time a smoky tendril made contact with shining scales it recoiled as if in pain.

Frank waited for the third fish to speak and complete the tripartite hallucination. It might have done so had it not been superseded by yet a fourth voice.

"Hi, Dad."