"IT BARGAINED."
"With what what?"
"YOUR LIFE, WARDEN."
I thought about that one for a few seconds. "Wait.... You needed its help to save me? And its price was that you don't tell me about it?"
"INDEED."
I exhaled slowly and ran my fingers over my head. Something was running around in there, giving me migraines. "Is it a danger to me?"
"IN TIME."
"What happens if it stays in there?" I asked.
"IT BURSTS FORTH FROM YOUR SKULL."
"Aglck!" I said. I couldn't help it. My skin was crawling. I'd seen those Alien Alien movies at a formative age. "How do I get it out?" movies at a formative age. "How do I get it out?"
Demonreach seemed to consider that for a moment. Then it said, "ASK GRASSHOPPER."
"Molly? Uh, seriously? You know she's new, right?"
It just looked at me.
"How long do I have to take care of it?" I asked.
"SOON."
"Soon? How soon is soon? What do you mean, soon?"
It just stared at me.
Right. Immortal, inhuman, wholly-focused-on-holding-evil-horde-still-forever sorts of creatures don't have a real solid grasp of the concept of time. From what I've seen and heard over the years, I've begun to understand that linear time is a uniquely mortal perspective. Other things aren't attached to it nearly as tightly as we are. There were bushes on the island older than me. There were trees there older than Chicago. Demonreach was not compatible with stopwatches or day planners.
"Okay," I said. "Okay, priorities: Put the skull-bursting-parasite issue aside for the moment. That leaves me in charge of a veritable doomsday machine that the White Council and everyone else is gonna flip out about. But they aren't going to flip out about it today, because presumably they don't even know I'm alive yet, and if I don't stay focused on the next twenty-four hours, I might not live long enough to have all that fun. So we forget about that for now, too."
"SENSIBLE PRIORITIES."
"I'm glad you approve," I said. I was pretty sure something that didn't understand minutes and seconds wouldn't be big on getting sarcasm either. "You've still got a problem. I need you to explain it to me."
"YOU ARE TOO LIMITED," Demonreach said. "IT WOULD DAMAGE YOU, AS IT DAMAGED YOUR SPIRIT."
I held up both my hands and half flinched. "For God's sake, don't think think it at me. You think way too loud." it at me. You think way too loud."
The glowing eyes looked somehow disgusted. "THIS MEANS OF CONVEYANCE OF IDEAS IS INEFFICIENT AND LIMITED."
"Words, words, words," I said. "Tell me about it. But it's what we've got, unless you can draw me a picture."
Demonreach was still for a moment-and then vines abruptly twined up out of the floor. I almost jumped, but stopped myself. It clearly hadn't done me any harm, apart from what I'd done to myself, and if it wanted to hurt me, I wasn't going to be able to stop it anyway. So I waited.
The vines twined up into my bag and came out wrapped around Bob's skull.
"Harry!" Bob squeaked.
"He's one of mine," I said in a hard voice. "You hurt him and you can forget me helping you."
"LITTLE ENTITY," Demonreach said. "YOU ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE WARDEN. YOU WILL TRANSLATE. YOU WILL NOT BE DAMAGED."
"Hey!" I said, and took a step between Demonreach and Bob. "Did you hear me, Hopalong? Put down the skull."
"Harry!" Bob said again. "Harry, wait! It heard you!"
I scowled and turned to look at Bob. He looked like the same old Bob. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," the skull said. The eyelights were flicking everywhere, as if watching dozens of screens at once. "Man, this thing is big! And old!"
"Is it hurting you?"
"Uh, no... no, it isn't. And it could if it wanted to. It's just... kind of a lot to take in...." Then the skull quivered in the grip of the tendrils and said, "Oh!"
"Oh, what?" I asked.
"It's explaining the problem," Bob reported. "It had to take it through several levels of dumbing-down before I was able to get it."
I grunted and relaxed a little. "Oh. So what's the problem?"
"Hang on. I'm trying to figure out how to dumb it down enough for you you to get it." to get it."
"Thanks," I growled.
"I got your back, boss." Then Bob bounced up and down in the tendrils a few times. "Hey, Hopalong! Turn this thing around this way!"
Demonreach glowered at the skull.
Bob jiggled a little more. "Come on! We're on a schedule here!"
I blinked at that. "Damn. You went from scared to wiseass pretty quick there, Bob."
Bob snorted. "'Cause as big and bad as this thing is, it needs me to talk to you, and that makes me important. And it knows it."
"LESSER BEINGS ONCE KNEW TO RESPECT THEIR ELDERS," Demonreach said.
"I respect the crap out of you," Bob complained. "You want me to help, and I'm telling you how. Now turn me around."
A sudden breeze passed through the cavern in a long, enormous sigh. And the vines stirred and twisted the skull toward the nearest wall.
Bob's eyelights brightened to brilliance and suddenly cast double cones of light on the wall. There was a scratchy sound that seemed to emanate from the skull itself, a blur of a sound like an old film sound track warming up, and then the old spotlight-sweeping 20th Century Fox logo appeared on the wall, along with the pompous trumpet-led symphony theme that often accompanied it.
"A movie?" I asked. "You can play movies movies?"
"And music! And TV! Butters gave me the Internet, baby! Now hush and pay attention."
The opening logo bit faded to black and then familiar blue lettering appeared. It read: A LONG TIME AGO, PRETTY MUCH RIGHT HERE...
"Okay, come on," I said. "You're going to buy me a lawsuit, Bob."
"Hush, Harry. Or you'll go to the special hell."
I blinked at that, confused. I'm not supposed to be the guy who doesn't get the reference joke, dammit.
On the wall, the black gave way to a star field that panned down to a blue-and-green planet. Earth. Then it zoomed in and in and in until I recognized the outline of Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes, and came closer still until it got to the outline of the island itself.
Bob is invaluable, but man, he loves his wisecracks and his drama.
The image sank down until it showed a familiar landing point, though it had no ruined town and no Whatsup Dock and no row of wooden piles in the water. It was just a little beach of dirt and sand and heavy, brooding forest growth.
Then a ribbon of light maybe eight feet long split the air vertically. The light broadened until it was maybe three feet wide, and then a figure appeared through it. I recognized the signs-someone had opened a Way, a passage from the Nevernever to the island. The figure emerged, made a gesture with one hand, and the Way closed behind it.
It was a man, fairly tall, fairly lean. He wore ragged clothing in many shades of grey. His grey cloak had a deep hood on it, and it shadowed his features, except for the tip of his nose and a short grey-white beard covering a rather pointy chin.
(Letters appeared at the bottom of the screen. They read: MERLIN.) "Wait? You saw Merlin?" I asked Bob.
"Nah," Bob said, "but I cast Alec Guinness. Looks good, right?"
I sighed. "Could you get to the point, please?"
"Oh, come on," Bob said. "I wrote in this romance triangle subplot and cast Jenna Jameson and Carrie Fisher. There's a love scene you're gonna really really-"
"Bob!"
"Okay, okay. Fine. Sheesh."
The movie shifted into fast motion. The grey-clad figure became a blur. It walked about waving its arms, and directed oceans of energy here and there, settling them all in and around the substance of the island itself.
"Wait. Did Demonreach tell you how he did that?"
"No," Bob said, annoyed. "It's called artistic license, Harry."
"Okay, I get it. Merlin built the island. However he did it. Get to the part with the problem."
Bob sighed.
Merlin walked into the woods in comically fast motion and vanished. Then time passed. The sun streaked by hundreds and then thousands of times, the shadows of the island bowing and twisting, the trees rising, growing, growing old, and dying. At the bottom of the screen, words appeared that read, A LOT OF TIME PASSES.
"Thank you for dumbing that down for me," I said.
"De nada."
Then the camera slowed. Again, Merlin appeared. Again, oceans of power rose up and settled into the island. Then Merlin vanished, and more years passed. Maybe a minute later, he appeared again-looking exactly the same, I might add-and repeated the cycle.
"Hold on," I said. "He did it again? Twice?"
"Ah," Bob said, as a fourth cycle began on the screen. "Sort of. See, Harry, this is one of those things that you're going to have trouble grabbing onto."
"Go slow and try me."
"Merlin didn't build the prison five times," Bob said. "He built it once. In five different different times. All at the same time." times. All at the same time."
I felt my brows knit. "Uh. He was in the same place, doing the same thing, in five different times at once?"
"Exactly."
"That does not make any sense," I said.
"Look, a mortal jail is built in three dimensions, right? Merlin built this one in four, and probably in several more, though you can't really tell whether or not he built it in a given dimension until you go there and measure it, and the act of measuring it will change it, but the point is: This is really advanced stuff."
I sighed. "Yeah. I'm getting that. But what's wrong?"
The shot zoomed out, rising up to give a top-down view of the island, which became a blurry shape. A familiar five-pointed star blazed itself across the surface of the lake, its lines so long that the pentagon shape at its center enfolded the island entirely. Within the pentagon, a second pentacle formed, like the first one drawn in the manner to preserve and protect. The camera tightened in, and I saw that the second pentagon enfolded the entire hilltop where the cottage and ruined tower lay. The camera tightened more, and I saw more pentacles drawn, this time not flat but at dozens of intersecting angles, their centers encircling the dozen tunnels full of evil beings beneath the island.
"These," Bob said, "represent the original enchantments on the island. This is vastly simplified, of course, but the basic star-and-circle architecture is the same as the work you do, Harry."
Then the design blurred and increased, growing denser and more delicate and more brilliant in power, until something twinged in my brain and I had to look away from the diagram.
"Yeah, sorry about that, boss. This is meant to represent the entanglement of the spells being delivered at different times."
"No wonder it was so complicated," I muttered.
"And it's even worse than this," Bob said. "I'm filtering it down for you. And here's the problem."
I forced myself to look back at the projection, and saw those millions upon millions of spells resonating with one another, spreading and interlocking into an impenetrable barrier. It was, I thought, somehow like watching crystals grow. The spells powering the actual construction of it hadn't been, alone, too much stronger than some of the work I had done-but when they'd been interconnected with their counterparts across time, they'd fed upon one another, created a perfect resonance of energy that had become something infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.
Then I saw the dissonance appear. Bob had chosen to show it as a sullen red light that began to pulse lightly at the westernmost edges of the great design. It began as something faint, but then, like an oncoming headache, started to throb into something larger and more noticeable. Where scarlet and blue light touched, there were ugly flares of energy-flares that I had been sensing ever since I'd gotten to the island. Before long, that scarlet pulse had spread to half the island, and then, abruptly, the screen went white.
Text at the bottom read, NOVEMBER 1.
"By tomorrow," I said. "Super. But I still don't see what is wrong wrong, Bob."
"Energy hits it," Bob said. "A directed burst of energy, a whole lot of it. It unravels the whole containment spell Merlin laid down and triggers the fail-safe."
"FIRE," rumbled Demonreach.
"I figured that one out, thanks," I said. "But nothing has actually happened to the spells yet?"
"Nope," said Bob. "That tension that's building? It's... Well, think of it as cause and effect, only backward."
"Huh?"