Last Call (Last Call 1)

"I don't know," Crane said. "Is that what set him off? I've got a tape I was playing in the car—Al Jolson, you know? White guy that always wore blackface? It's a song he used to sing."

Leon seemed jarred, and shook his head. "Deal the cards," he muttered. "Get this over with."

Crane willed his hands to be steady as he skimmed the first cards across the table. Don't want to screw up here, he thought, and have them declare a misdeal.

Nobody really looked likely to, though. Get this over with was clearly the mood of the table.

The animated, nearly invisible statues on the lakeshore seemed to be angular ectoplasmic balloons—when Nardie swiped at them with the edge of the chip, they tore and blew away like cellophane dandelion seeds, releasing hot, dry air and a smell of long-desiccated organic stuff.

And though the nearly invisible substance of the things warped the glaring sunlight like rippling lenses when they all crowded in around the two women, forcing Diana to squint and bob her head to guess exactly in which direction the water lay, she was able to push the things aside as easily as if they had been big soft-skinned helium balloons.

Their yielding skins were cold to the touch, and Diana's hands were becoming achingly numb even as the sun beat down on her head and face.

At one point the giant transparency that was the Circus Circus clown dropped one ludicrously big foot right over her, and she had a moment of fishbowl vision and felt as though she had been bathed in a shower of menthol.

"Straight ahead, I think," she gasped when it had lifted and freed her. "This isn't so bad, you know?"

Dinh had been keeping the things away from herself with the sweeping edge of the chip. "They're getting tougher to cut, though," she gasped. A moment later she added, "Especially the ones you've touched."

Diana realized that she was tired—sweating and breathing through her slackly open mouth—even though she was hardly doing anything more strenuous than walking slowly across the hot sand; and when she glanced around her at the crystal shapes she had pushed out of her way, it seemed to her that those ones were more substantial and were visibly tinted pink, faintly filtering the colors of the sand and the distant water.

Every one of the figures, in fact, looked solider.

Suddenly she was cold all over again, but from fear now, and she crowded in close to Nardie's back. "God, Nardie," she said tightly, "I think they've been draining me here, somehow, when I was pushing them out of the way, like eating me. Keep 'em off with the chip; I'm not touching them anymore."

"We got to get to the water."

Diana ducked and scampered away from a dwarfish crystal cowboy with long, flailing arms. "Soon," she panted in agreement. The air was sour with a smell like broken old bones.

"How come they would"—Nardie swiped at a grinning transparent Arab—"want to eat you, eat us?"

"Maybe so we'd—take their shapes. Absorb us before we get to the water, while we're still not—unpalatable, inedible."

Diana was sure she could see some of her own lost substance in the phantoms; their arms whistled through the air now, and their feet made indentations in the sand.

They had weight now.

Twice the giant Circus Circus clown had nearly stomped them before Nardie had danced in and cut its ankle; one towering leg was now emptied and gone, but the clown was hopping from one dune to another on its remaining leg, substantial enough to kick up real, stinging clouds of sand, and it seemed more likely than before to land a Volkswagen-size foot on them. And it looked as if it would be a pile driver blow now, not a menthol shower.

The glassy pink figures were crowding up from the lakeside. Diana and Nardie were being slowly driven back, toward the highway.

And now suddenly the figures had something like fingernails; twice Diana had narrowly ducked away from one of them, and her upflung arm had been raked by something that stung and raised blisters.

Worse even than the very real possibility of physical death was Diana's conviction that the things were capable of more, that they could somehow consume her and Nardie, render the two of them down into some basic psychic stuff that would fill their multitudinous, presently empty shapes.

And then Nardie and Diana would be no more than unaware ghosts in the mannequins and effigies scattered all over the city, no longer any kind of threat to the King—just semi-sentient sacrifices to unknowable chaotic gods.

Diana kept one hand on Dinh's shoulder, and together they darted and retreated and advanced, step by step diagonally closer to the water, moving toward it in a slant to keep the two giants hedged back by the more normal-size figures.

Nardie's hand snaked out again, and a grinning two-dimensional figure in the apron of a dealer tore apart silently into translucent splinters.

"Good," said Diana tensely, "we're nearly there."