Dream Thing

But Remo did. His hands clapped together with such ferocity and speed that even he hadn’t seen them coming together, and his opponent’s skull splattered. His fingers slipped off the face of the old Korean and Chiun staggered backward, falling to his knees and staring blindly at the heavens.

Sa Mangsang trumpeted angrily and a questing tentacle slithered onto the rocky shelf, feeling among the remnants of the last attacker. Nothing left!

Remo knew what that meant. The head was destroyed, and so was the essence that Sa Mangsang fed upon. Remo drifted up to the two Faithful whose arms no longer worked, and he bashed their brains into paste in two heartbeats while Sa Mangsang bellowed for him to desist.

Another one was in the water. Remo ran to the edge of the rock and sailed into open space.

Cease, mongrel!

Sa Mangsang snatched the Master of Sinanju midleap, and Remo felt the embrace of the great tentacle squeeze his chest—but it was removed. It didn’t alarm him. Remo collapsed his chest faster than Sa Mangsang could tighten. He slipped free of the tentacle and came down atop the Faithful of Saraswati who tread the water in a stupor. Remo snatched the man by the hair, severed his neck with a vicious slash of his hand and flung the head at the rock sides of the lake. It hit hard and spattered brain tissue in every direction.

Remo flew out of the water in the clutches of a great tentacle, the island resounding with the enraged trumpets of the great elder god. Remo felt his own hatred erupt hotter than his human body could contain, more intense than his human body could endure.

When the great beak opened to devour him, Remo ripped apart the tentacle that held him, dropped onto the face of the elder god and snagged the rubbery flesh. He kicked violently, an unpretty spasm of his entire human body, and the massive beak shattered.

The colossus roared and snatched at the Master of Sinanju.

Remo gripped the flesh and dragged himself to a great, black and oily eye. He was the size of an ant compared to the monstrous Sa Mangsang, but Remo bellowed, “You are as a mongrel to Shiva the Destroyer.”

His eyes were blazing red and somewhere, far away, Remo Williams witnessed his own hideous reflection. He saw the smoke rising from where his blazing hands seared the Dream Thing’s flesh.

Sa Mangsang quaked. Sa Mangsang was afraid. The huge, wheezing ruin of its beak moved and croaked out human words.

“But I will become as a wolf to Shiva’s flock.”

“Fah!” Remo placed his blazing hand on the bulb of the huge black eye and it burst.

Sa Mangsang shuddered.

Remo clawed across the massive body. Sa Mangsang fought to keep the other eye inside the rubbery folds of flesh. Shiva batted the tentacles away and ripped through the flesh until the eye was exposed and then he burned it with his hand until it burst.

The colossal creature tensed and reared up, filled with one last burst of vitality, but then it hit the wall.

From the rock around it, it heard the sound of a human voice, speaking quiet and low. It was an old man, but not the old man on the rocks above.

Shiva heard it, too, and stood in silence absorbing the sound.

An old man, sobbing somewhere on the other side of the world, was speaking the magic words that carried all the way to the realm of Sa Mangsang.

“Dee-ya, dee-ya, dee-ya. Dee-ya, dee-ya, dee-ya.”

Sa Mangsang sagged. Its body submerged into the green slime of the lake.

Remo jumped across to the shore and watched as water bubbled up in the lake. He said nothing.

Chiun felt his strength returning, although his head bled with pain. He went to the lake edge, and saw that the thing had collapsed into slumber. Remo had rendered it unconscious.

Or the thing in Remo’s body had done it. Chiun faced the statuesque figure of the man he called his son, and Chiun bowed to those glowing red eyes.

“All honor to you, great Shiva.”

“Chiun!” the Destroyer growled. “Chiun. Stop it. It’s me.”

His voice demodulated with each word. When Chiun raised his eyes, the eyes no longer blazed with fire. They were the eyes again of his son.

“All honor to you, great Master of Sinanju,” Chiun said, a trace of a smile on his old lips. “You have bested Ru-Taki-Nuhu.”

Remo nodded and turned away.

He landed on his knees and put a hand to his mouth to hold in the bile that threatened to retch out of him. His body was suffering in ways he didn’t understand.

He felt the gentle, strong hands of his father guiding him through the city. The smell of the decomposing bodies made him gag.

“Too much human rot,” Remo tried to explain. “This place is too unclean.”

But that wasn’t the whole of it. It wasn’t just the putrefaction around him that made him ill, but the fragment of filth that had been placed inside of him.

How had it gotten there? Just by association with Sa Mangsang, or had Sa Mangsang thrust it upon him? What was it and what did it mean?

All he knew at the moment was that it was making him want to throw up.

They were ankle deep in water when they reached the shore.