The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

No doubt my own virtuous image bore a similar grimace in their second sight Madame Ruth had been right; we needed to hurry. Something was breathing down the neck I hadn't brought along to the Nine Beyonds. I didn't know what the One Called Night could do to me, but I was very conscious of operating on the Power's turf - or rather, muck. If it took hold of me…

Just then, one of us (to this day, I don't know who) managed to get a hand loose and break the circle. Coming back wasn't like returning from the garden; I seemed to be falling and falling in a forever compressed into maybe a second and a half. Worse still, I thought the One Called Night was falling after me, falling faster than I was, reaching out with black, black hands in which never a star would shine.

Under the virtuous reality helmet, my eyes flew open. I saw only darkness there, too, but it was a darkness I knew, the familiar darkness of This Side. Unlike the blacker than black of the Nine Beyonds, I knew what to do about this. I yanked the helmet off my head and sat blinking in the mellow afternoon sun.

I got my helmet off just ahead of Nigel Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth. Their faces - their real, everyday faces, not the idealized images they bore in the realms of virtuous reality - were pale and haggard, as yours would be, as mine surely was, after such a narrow escape.

Cholmondeley leaned forward, pulled off Judy's virtuous reality helmet Her face showed nothing, just as it had before the helmet went on. Her spirit hadn't been in there to experience what we'd gone through.

Madame Ruth wiped sweat from her forehead with one sleeve. I didn't think the sweat had anything to do with wearing the helmet. "Jesus," she muttered. "It tried to follow us back."

Too bloody right it did." Cholmondeley also sounded shaken to the core. "I think it used Mistress Ather as its conduit: it controls her spirit, after all."

"I never heard of that," I said.

"Nor had I," Cholmondeley answered. "Nor, so far as I know, has any practitioner of virtuous reality. Of course, there is the caveat that anyone encountering the phenomenon at full strength, so to speak, is unlikely to remain a practitioner of virtuous reality, or, indeed, of any trade thereafter." He essayed a laugh; it came out as a series of nervous little barks.

The procedure was unsuccessful?" Hr. Murad asked. He hadn't been there with us. Lucky him.

"Buddy, you're lucky - we're lucky - it's us sittin' here talking to you, and not the One Called Night," Madame Ruth said. Nigel Cholmondeley's nod in support of that was as herky-jerky as his laugh had been.

I stood up. I felt as if I'd been away from my body for a long time, slogging through the steaming, lighdess swamps of the Nine Beyonds. The physical part of me, though, the part that hadn't left the chair, rose now so smoothly that I knew virtuous reality had fooled me again, Before Hr. Murad could turn Judy the right way around on her bed, I leaned over the footboard and looked down into her face. Her eyes were open, and looking back at me.

Nothing showed in them, any more than it had before: no recognition of me, no awareness of where she was.

I kept looking, down into the blackness other pupils. Was the One Called Night hiding in that blackness, peering back at me through those portholes into This Side while it held her spirit trapped in the Nine Beyonds? I had no way to tell.

When I stepped back, the healer did put Judy back where she belonged. Nigel Cholmondeley was glumly packing the virtuous reality helmets back into their travel case. He set a hand on my arm. Terribly sorry, old man, I truly am. I'd hoped for better results."

"So did I." I looked at Judy again. If we couldn't get her spirit back from the Nine Beyonds, she was going to stay in that bed for the rest of her life, eating when they fed her, drinking when they gave her water, wiggling every now and then for no reason at all. And what would happen when she died? Could her spirit break free of the One Called Night even then?

I shivered all over, and the room wasn't that cool. In a way, she was even worse off than Jesus Cordero. With no natural soul of his own, he at least had hopes of getting an artificial one from Slow Jinn Fizz. But what could Ramzan Durani do for Judy, whose spirit was stolen rather than absent?

What could anyone do?

Hr. Murad stepped in front of Madame Ruth as she was about to go out the door. "Wait, please," he said in the tone of somebody trying - not too hard - to be polite about giving an order. "We have not yet fully examined the etiology of your treatment's failure."

Madame Ruth looked down her nose at him. She was taller than he was, as well as wider. "If you don't get out of that doorway, sonny, I'm gonna squash you flat. You ask nice, maybe we'll talk about it later. Right now I need a drink or two a whole lot more than I need you." She advanced. Hr. Murad retreated. Nigel Cholmondeley followed in her massive wake.