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It was as if the ship were caught in the viselike grip of a giant and, despite the groaning, protesting engines, was being forced onto its side. Dahlberg gripped the railing as the slant grew worse and all ma
With a squeal of metal, the elevator nearest to her shuddered in its vertical housing, and then—with a popping of glass that ripped through the entire Atrium—the entire tube shattered all at once and began to fall in slow motion like a glittering glass curtain. The wreck of the elevator—now nothing more than a steel frame—was jarred out of its cha
Dahlberg gripped the brass rail with all her strength as the floor continued to dip. A new sound suddenly erupted from below, loud as a massive waterfall, accompanied by a rush of cold salty air so strong it nearly blew her off her perch; then white water poured into the lowest level of the Atrium and began boiling up, a vicious surge churning with pulverized furniture, fixtures, and broken bodies. At the same time the huge chandelier above her head finally ripped lose with crack of iron and plaster; the huge glittering mass fell at an angle, crashed into the parapet just opposite her, then cartwheeled down the side of the Atrium, throwing off great masses of glittering crystal like pulverized ice.
The cold, dead smell of the sea filled her nostrils. Slowly—as if from far away—she began to realize that, despite the awful destruction taking place all around her, the ship didn’t appear to be sinking; at least not yet. Instead, it was heeling over and shipping water. The engines continued to roar, the ship continued to surge forward.
Dahlberg collected her thoughts, tried to drown out the sounds of crashing glass, roaring water, and screaming. Much as she wanted to, there was nothing she could do to help anybody here. What she could do,had to do, was inform the bridge that the lifeboats were not an option as long as the ship was moving. She looked around and spied a nearby stairwell. Carefully gripping the rail, she half crawled, half clung her way along it until she reached the stairwell, canted at a crazy angle. Gripping the banister with all her might, she began hauling herself upward, one step at a time, heading for the auxiliary bridge.
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SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST STARED AT THE BIZARRE THING OF MIST and darkness that enveloped him. Simultaneously, he felt the cabin shudder and lean; a deep and powerful vibration hammered up from below. Something violent was happening to the ship. He fell backward, tumbled over an armchair, and slammed into a bookcase. As the ship tilted farther he could hear a sonorous fugue of destruction and despair sounding throughout it: screams and cries, crashing, breaking, the deep thrum of water along the hull. Books came tumbling down around him as the cabin rolled to a desperate angle.
He struck it all from his mind, focusing on the thing—the most bizarre thing. Within the animate smoke, an apparition was faintly visible: rolling red eyes, fanged smile, clawed hands outstretched as it enveloped him, its expression that of need and intense hunger.
Several things flitted almost instantaneously through his mind. He knew what this was, and he knew who had created it, and why. He knew he now faced a fight, not only for his life, but for his very soul. He braced himself mentally as the thing caught him in a clammy embrace, overwhelming his senses with the cloying odor of a damp, rotting cellar, of slippery insects and sagging corpses.
Pendergast abruptly felt calm wash over him—the indifferent, liberating calm he had so recently discovered. He had been taken by surprise; he had little time to prepare; but he could tap into the extraordinary mental powers the Agozyen had set free within his mind and, in so doing, emerge victorious. This contest would be a test for those powers, a baptism by fire.
The thing was trying to enter his mind, probing with damp tendrils of will, of pure desire. He let his mind go blank. He would give it no purchase, nothing to fasten on to. With breathtaking speed, he brought his mind first to the state ofth’an shin gha , the Doorstep to Perfect Emptiness, and thenstong pa nyid —the State of Pure Emptiness. The thing would enter and find the room empty. No—there would not even be a room for it to enter.
Vaguely, he was aware of the entity searching the emptiness, drifting, malevolent, eyes like glowing cigarette tips. It thrashed about, seeking an anchor, like a cat sinking in a bottomless ocean. It was already defeated.
It ceased thrashing—and suddenly, like lightning, it wrapped its greasy tendrils around him, sinking fangs directly into Pendergast’s mind.
A jolt of terrible pain seared through him. He responded immediately with the opposite tack. He would fight fire with fire, create an impassible mental barrier. He’d wall himself off with pure intellectual noise, deafening and impenetrable.
In the dark void, he summoned a hundred of the world’s most important philosophers and set them all to conversation: Parmenides and Descartes, Heraclitus and Kant, Socrates and Nietzsche. At once, dozens upon dozens of arguments sprouted—of nature and consciousness, freedom and pure reason, truth and the divinity of numbers—forming a storm of intellectual noise stretching from horizon to horizon. Scarcely breathing, Pendergast maintained the construct through sheer force of will.
A ripple coursed through the susurrus of dialogues, like a drop of water on the surface of a black pond. As it spread outward, the nearest conversations of the philosophers fell silent. A silent hole formed in the center, like the eye of a storm. Implacably, the smoke ghost drifted through the hole, coming closer.
Instantly, Pendergast dissolved the i
Quickly, he arrayed in his mind the thousand greatest paintings of the Western tradition. One after another, in chronological order, he allowed them to fill up to the edges the entire frame of his consciousness; he willed their colors, brushstrokes, symbols, hidden meanings, allegories subtle and obvious, to flood his entire consciousness. Duccio’sMaestà; Botticelli’sBirth of Venus; Masaccio’s Trinity; Fabriano’sAdoration ; Van Eyck’sBetrothal of Arnolfini burst again and again upon his mental landscape, drowning all thought with their complexity, their ravishing beauty. He continued through them, faster and faster, until he approached the present, Rousseau and Kandinsky and Marin. Then he went back and started over from the begi