All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [42]
But it was not nothing. Not exactly.
It felt to Eliot more like an empty page: blank, yes, but perhaps the beginning of something. If only the right person would come along, with the right pen . . . they could fill that page up with anything they wanted.
He left the earth where it was and pulled his hand out.
Kino watched him and Fiona. He put his sunglasses back on, and the windows of the Cadillac eased up and sealed with a thunk.
Eliot was glad this little demonstration was over.
He and Fiona moved toward the back doors.
The Cadillac’s engine revved; the car jumped, fishtailed, and sprayed them with dust.
Uncle Kino sped off.
12. Kino La Croix (aka Baron Samedi and alternate Voodoo personas, Baron Cimetière, and Baron La Croix. Note: Samedi is French for “Saturday.”) He is depicted in a white top hat, black tuxedo, and dark glasses. Only rarely seen outside Haiti and other tropical locations. Haitian dictator, Duvalier François, reputedly dressed like Baron Samedi to increase his air of mystery—although some mythohistorians claim the two were the same person (for a while). According to Voodoo practitioners, Baron Samedi stands at the crossroads, where the souls of dead humans pass to the nether realms. Gods of the First and Twenty-first Century, Volume 5, Core Myths (Part 2). Zypheron Press Ltd., Eighth Edition.
11
BORDERLANDS
Fiona couldn’t believe it. “He ditched us!” she cried.
She picked up a rock and chucked it after Kino’s Cadillac. It was a futile gesture. The red taillights winked in the distance, obscured by dust and smoke, then swallowed by shadows.
It was very dark. The only light was from a smoldering river of lava in the valley below.
“Eliot?” she whispered.
“I’m here,” he said. “Hang on.”
He snapped on a flashlight, the same one they’d had in the sewers when they hunted Sobek.
“You’re still carrying that around?”
“A first aid kit, too,” he said. “Some water, and a few granola bars, just in case. I even have Cee’s lunch if we get really desperate.”
It was one of the few times her brother had impressed her. Fiona would never in a million years, though, tell him this.
Eliot looked through the gate. “Do you really think it’s—?”
She stood next to him. Wind blasted her and carried with it a thousand screams and cries of pain from the depths. A plume of magma blasted from a giant fissure and sent a shower of sparks a mile high into the rust-colored sky.
“What else could it be?”
Eliot held up a hand, fingers outstretched. “I feel it’s something terrible,” he whispered, “but part of me belongs down there. I can’t explain it.”
Fiona pulled him back from the gate. The heat must have boiled his brains.
“Are you crazy? Nothing belongs down there.”
But she felt it, too. A little tug . . . as if just on the other side of this valley of nightmares there might be something terrible and wonderful, waiting for them. Or maybe it was that feeling you got when you looked down from a tall building or bridge, wondering (but never seriously) what it would be like to jump.
“There!” someone called.
The voice was far away, on the other side of the gate, and so faint, Fiona wasn’t sure if it had been real or not.
It came again, this time more urgent: “A light—I saw a light! Up there! Quick!”
Shadowy shapes scrambled up the steep embankment toward the gate. Men and women, wild eyes gleaming, and carrying with them a scent she’d smelled too many times: on Perry Millhouse, and when Mike Poole dipped his hand into the deep fryer—burned human flesh.
“We better go,” she said.
Two figures ran up the path on the other side of the gate . . . then six . . . then dozens.
The ground trembled as they stampeded the gate. They cried and screamed and shouted: “There! They’re opening the gates! Give me that flashlight! You, come here!”
Eliot backed up.
The gate look impenetrable by anything less than an atomic bomb . . . but the adjacent fence was