Artemis Fowl_ The Opal Deception - Eoin Colfer [107]
Suddenly Artemis froze—in the middle of a heaving intersection.
Butler glowered at the three lanes of city traffic, a hundred impatient drivers leaning on their horns.
“I feel something,” breathed Artemis. “Electricity.”
“Could you please feel it on the other side of the road?” asked Butler.
Artemis stretched out his arms and felt a tingle on his palms.
“He’s coming, after all, but several yards off target. Somewhere there is a constant that is not constant.”
A shape formed in the air. From nothing came a cluster of sparks and the smell of sulfur. Inside the cluster, a gray-green thing appeared, with golden eyes, chunky scales, and great horned ears. It stepped out of nowhere and onto the road. It stood erect, five feet high, humanoid, but there was no mistaking this creature for human. It sniffed the air through slitted nostrils, opened a snake’s mouth, and spoke.
“Felicitations to Lady Heatherington Smythe,” it said in a voice of crushed glass and grating steel. The creature grasped Artemis’s outstretched palm with a four-fingered hand.
“Curious,” said the Irish boy.
Butler wasn’t interested in curious. He was interested in getting Artemis away from this creature as quickly as possible.
“Let’s go,” he said brusquely, laying a hand on Artemis’s shoulder.
But Artemis was already gone. The creature had disappeared as quickly as it had come, taking the teenager with him. The incident would make the news later that day, but strangely enough, in spite of the hundreds of tourists armed with cameras, there would be no pictures.
The creature was insubstantial, as though it did not have a proper hold on this world. Its grip on Artemis’s hand was soft with a hard core, like bone wrapped in foam rubber. Artemis did not try to pull away; he was fascinated.
“Lady Heatherington Smythe?” repeated the creature, and Artemis could hear that it was scared. “Dost this be her estate?”
Hardly modern syntax, thought Artemis. But definitely English. Now, how does a demon exiled in Limbo learn to speak English?
The air buzzed with power, and white electrical bolts crackled around the creature, slicing holes in space.
A temporal rent. A hole in time.
Artemis was not overly awed by this; after all, he had seen the Lower Elements Police actually stop time during the Fowl Manor siege. What did concern him was that he was likely to be whisked away with the creature, in which case the chances of him being returned to his own dimension were small. The chances of him being returned to his own time were minuscule.
He tried to call out to Butler, but it was too late. If the word late can be used in a place where time does not exist.
The rent had expanded to envelop both him and the demon. The architecture and population of Barcelona faded slowly like spirits, to be replaced first by a purple fog, then a galaxy of stars. Artemis experienced feverish heat, then bitter cold. He felt sure that if he materialized fully he would be scorched to cinders, then his ashes would freeze and scatter across space.
Their surroundings changed in a flash, or maybe a year; it was impossible to tell. The stars were replaced by an ocean, and they were underneath it. Strange deep-sea creatures loomed from the depths, luminous tentacles scything the water all around them. Then there was a field of ice, then a red landscape, the air filled with fine dust. Finally they were looking at Barcelona again. But different. The city was younger.
The demon howled and gnashed its pointed teeth, abandoning all attempts to speak English. Luckily, Artemis was one of two humans in any dimension who spoke Gnommish, the fairy language.
“Calm yourself, friend,” he said. “Our fate is sealed. Enjoy these beautiful sights.”
The demon’s howl ceased abruptly, and he dropped Artemis’s hand.
“Speak you fairy tongue?”
“Gnommish,” corrected Artemis. “And better than you, I might add.”
The demon fell silent, regarding Artemis as though he were some kind of wondrous creature. Which, of course, he was. Artemis, for his part, spent what could