Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [131]
The reaction was more pronounced now: a cold shiver, a slight feeling of vertigo and disorientation. He had to keep his eyes open. When he closed them, he started tipping forward.
He looked at the dials. The thing was huge, spread right across the subsonics.
Let it go, he told himself. Let it go. It’s too big.
He had it now, though. There was no way he could hold on to something like that with his standard equipment. It would simply phase into a different frequency and escape. But with the echo chamber, he could keep it pinned, pounding it with confusing signals that all interfered with one another.
He could get this one. Forget the golem, forget everything else. He just wanted to see it. Then he’d send it back. But just to see it!
Excited, riding on a fear-driven high, he worked the dials feverishly. He set up more vibrations, seeking the daemon’s primary frequencies, narrowing and narrowing the bandwidth until he matched them. The daemon was shifting wavelengths, trying to escape the cage, but he shifted with it, never letting it get away from him. The closer he came, the less space the daemon had to wriggle.
The air was throbbing. The echo chamber pulsed with invisible energies.
Spit and blood, this is working! This is actually working!
Once he had it fixed as best he could, he stepped away from the console and went to peer inside the echo chamber. Through the porthole in the door, he could see that the sphere was empty. But he wasn’t disheartened. Inside, perspectives bent out of shape, and the air warped in eye-watering contortions. Something was coming. He could hardly breathe for terror and fascination. Leaning close to the thick glass, he tried to see farther inside.
A colossal, mad eye stared back at him.
He yelled, falling away from the porthole, his heart thumping hard enough to hurt. That vast eye had surged out of nowhere, surfacing into his reality, burning itself onto his consciousness. He saw it now, impossibly huge, belonging to something far bigger than the echo chamber could contain.
There was a heavy impact, and the echo chamber rocked to one side. Crake sat where he’d fallen, transfixed. Again, the sound of a giant’s fist pounding. The echo chamber dented outward.
Oh, no. No, no.
He scrambled to his feet and ran for the console. Get rid of it, get rid of it, any way you can.
Another impact, sending a shudder through the whole sanctum. The electric lamps flickered. One tipped over, crashing to the ground. Crake lost his footing, stumbled onward.
And then he heard her scream.
The sound froze him to the bone. It was more dreadful than anything he could imagine, more dreadful than the thing in the echo chamber. His world tipped into the primal, inescapable horror of a nightmare as he looked over at his niece, standing there in her white nightdress. She was just outside the circle of resonator poles, transfixed by the scene before her.
He would never know how she’d gotten the key to the wine cellar. Perhaps she’d found an old copy in some dusty, hidden place. Had she been planning this moment ever since? Had she been unable to sleep, so keen was she to see the secret wonderland of toys where her uncle Grayther worked? Had she set her clock to wake her, hoping to sneak down in the dead of night when she thought he wouldn’t be there?
He would never know how or why, but it didn’t matter in the end. What mattered was that she was here, and the daemon was uncontainable. The door of the echo chamber flew open, and the last thing he knew before his life changed forever was a hurricane wind that smelled of sulfur, and a deafening, unearthly howl.
WHEN HIS SENSES RETURNED to him, the sanctum was dark and silent. A single electric lamp remained unsmashed. It lay on its side near the echo chamber, underlighting the looming shape of the armored suit, which was still connected by cables to the dented metal sphere.
Crake was disoriented. It took him several seconds to understand where he was. His mind felt scratched and sore, as if rodents