Chapter Text
Wilson Higgsbury had made a lot of stupid mistakes before, but this one crossed the line. Instead of turning back to the campfire and looking at the miserable victim of his lies, he took a blind step back. He was still looking at the black stones, still talking.
William knew how quick the man’s reactions were, he saw how it usually ended, but now Wilson must have let himself get carried away. He didn’t pay any mind to the rustling, the ringing of the chainmail - it felt cold as ice even through the layers of fabric. He ignored the creaking snow behind him. He probably thought it was no threat.
Of course.
It was just William.
The sabre cut through the air with a terrible, disgusting sound. William had no idea that his weapon was capable of that, that anything in the world was capable of that: the screech was almost alive, and he was awash with smoke when the blade met flesh.
Wilson stopped a phrase at the exhale. He managed to raise his hand and dodge, falling to the left. The sabre cut along his arm, elbow to wrist, taking apart the layers of fabric. William knew each and every one, from the sleeves to the old wrappings on his hands, he couldn’t not know. He saw Wilson dress so many times, and even helped him once or twice.
He knew Wilson Higgsbury very well.
The blade slipped under fabric, under straw and more fabric, deeper still. The hilt reacted. William could have sworn the metal trembled.
Blood splattered on the ground.
Wilson fell, leaning on his good hand, raking in snow. He moved forward. A part of William’s mind reacted - a dark, ancient part that grew and learned in this world, that was used to fighting, looking for openings and weaknesses, fighting again, fighting to survive, to eat
Don’t starve
It let him know how clumsy Wilson was, how careless. He let go of a chance to attack William’s legs, maybe even knock him to the ground. His short height would be just enough.
Wilson didn’t.
Instead, he rolled away, dodging another hit of the screeching blade
screeching was more muffled
and shouted:
“William!”
“William!”
He was closer to the campfire than William, a whole foot closer. That meant being closer to what was left there.
“Can’t let him reach the axe,” William thought. Blood pulsed in his ears, smoke mixed with something red that bled across his vision. Every beat of his heart pumped a new flash, and his peripheral vision was one big blind spot, swimming in red mist.
“Maxie! Will!”
The smoke crushed over them and the stage drowned in darkness. There was a wave of thundering applause and there was the music, the awful, torturous dancing music that wormed into his ears and gnawed at his brain.
William made another hit, blindly.
The weapon was almost knocked from his hands. The transparent metal clashed with steel.
She was lifted up. The pages were turning by themselves, as if moved by wind, no, by a tornado. Did the book even have this many pages?
William cursed aloud and lunged again, jumping to the right and turning. If he was in Wilson’s place he’d try to attack again, even if the previous blow hit the blunt end. Wilson had grabbed the axe haphazardly, as he wasn’t even going to fight.
Another mistake.
Claws and teeth in the darkness.
“You screw up a lot,” William growled, lunging forward again. The fire, blindingly white, danced to his side, creeping painfully through the red mist.
Wilson dodged. Sparks flew out, making William back away.
For a second they both stilled, breathing heavily, staring at each other. The campfire was between them.
Wilson’s expression was terrifying. He trembled, then bared his teeth, but it wasn’t a grin of a predator. This wasn’t the lithe, resilient man in a battle stance with a deadly sharp axe in his hand, the man who could take on a gigantic tree and a monstrous spider, ready to fight anything and anyone. At that moment, he was no predator. His face was twisted with pain, and his clenched teeth showed only pain, the peak of suffering, a terrible, unbearable misery. For a second, William doubted the wound was a surface one. An expression like that could only belong to the dying. It looked like agony.
The blood dripped off the fabric on his left hand. The red mist pulsed around it.
“Maxwell,” Wilson struggled, pain and anger hissing on his breath. The axe shook in his hands. His whole body was shaking. “I- I’ll kill you. I will bloody kill you.”
“Tell me, pal,” William seethed, licking his lips. “Are you done pretending?”
The firelight danced along the axe blade, thrashing like a hanged man. Wilson gripped it with both hands.
“Yes,” he forced out, trying to smile. His grimace got worse. Eating meat bleached his bare teeth to ivory-white. “I screw up again and again. Nothing- over and over. I’m such a- useless- stupid mockery- the same mistake.”
“Why didn’t you kill me? Saved for the winter? Well, the winter’s here! Or do you just enjoy my suffering?”
Wilson was silent.
“You…” he said. “What are you-”
“The Middle Ages are nothing compared to you! - William took a step, a half-burned branch snapping beneath his feet. “Torturing a man with hope! A little too complicated for someone who doesn’t read books, isn’t it? Why did you do it, Higgsbury, god, why? Why did you string me along? There is no gate! No way out! And you’ve always known it!“
The claws and the teeth twisted off the pages, dissolving everything in the dark stench and the smoke. This is no music, William thought, it’s a scream. How could he think it was music? Charlie is screaming, and
“Why did you trick me?” The bloodstained blade of his sword trembled. William realised he was trembling, too. “Didn’t think I could fight back? Can’t take you on, mister survivalist? What a waste… I had- I had a great teacher.”
and the scream burns like a red flower in the darkness, pulses like blood. He’s being torn apart, into a thousand million pieces. He wants to scream, too, but he can’t breathe. The dust is filling his mouth, he can’t breathe and the blood pulses in his ears.
There’s only the dust and the darkness, and the shadows. The scream turns into something terrible. William struggles to help, to do something while he still can, but he can’t feel his body.
A magician with no body. That would put Houdini to shame.
“Magician”
William reaches forward with his mind. Dust mixes together with the red tatters and devours them. Shadows slip past, coming closer.
“Charlie, Charlie!”
The sound is overwhelming, as if time and space itself is crushing in on itself. William knows - it’s just the music, just the dust. Just the scream.
“And the woman,” William felt something drip down his cheeks, and realised it were tears. “Charlie. She was- was right there in front of me. What did you do to her, you bastard? What did you do?”
“Nothing.” Wilson’s voice is all disbelief and something more, something strange. “I don’t know any Charlie. I didn’t want to kill you, I- at first I did, but then- but I- told you the truth yesterday, you- this is wrong, it’s a mistake.”
His struggle could have torn stars apart. He remembered words, but had no mouth to speak. He remembered pages, but they got taken apart by the dust.
“Magician.”
Uncle Henry was right all along. All he could do were cheap, simple, useless tricks. It was all tricks: escaping an angry crowd, pulling a rabbit out of a hat, deceit, slipping and escaping. Magic tricks out of his sleeve. Miracles made of whatever.
A billion dust particles pierce through him, take him apart, twist and destroy him - his feelings, his memory in tatters of color, shrunken a thousand times over, swallowed and devoured by the shadows and the smoke.
“I didn’t want to kill you,” Wilson pleaded. ”I don’t want to kill you.”
He did the only thing he knew how. What he always did. What he was going to do that evening.
And he tried to do it as best he could.
“You’re not Maxwell.”
“Why did you do it,” William repeated, numbly. His mind was filled with tatters of color, too many and too terrible. Too terrible to put together, too complex. Billions of dust particles making up the world.
“I didn’t. I- I believe we can complete the gate. I believe you. Maybe- maybe I’m just following my own mistakes, but I believe you. I didn’t plan anything against you, why would you even think that… We’ll find a way forward, Carter.”
The music played on. The scream, William knew, the endless scream.
“Turn it off,” he said, barely audible.
“We’ll find the way. You and me. You’re not Maxwell… Maxwell is gone, it’s a time paradox, the world is broken, so it’s possible… and you are William Carter, magician, my companion, my friend, my- William, you’re ill, you’re delirious, the world must be breaking you with it, you’re tied together, William, please, put down the sword, I don’t want to hurt you, I-”
“Turn it off,” William said out loud. He didn’t know if he believed Wilson or not. He wanted to. Wanted as much as he wanted to find the door, as much as he wanted to quench his hunger, as much as he wanted to escape. But there was so much smoke, and it carried pain and the screaming with it. William couldn’t think. The dust mixed like clay, creating and destroying. William would beg anyone, even uncle Henry, and he begged:
“Turn it-”
“Goddamn it... no!”
Wilson disappeared to the side, taken by the red mist. William turned his head feverishly, grimacing in pain, and saw his
companion? enemy? no, he didn’t want Wilson to be his enemy, he’d do anything for-
He saw Wilson jump at the dark shadow, the claws in the dark that crawled on the ground towards the fire. Saw him trample the snow, ice flying everywhere.
The shadow flinched and jerked away, as it was real.
“William! The other one! They’ll put out the fire!”
William looked down. The music was cutting his head from the inside out. A shadow hand reached towards the barely burning flame.
Maybe it was all in his head. The world blurred and trembled. The red mist and the black smoke mixed together like playing cards.
He didn’t know what was true and what was fiction. He realised he’d never really known, it just became clear moments ago. All the moves were the wrong ones, all led to his downfall. He was lost, dissolved in the shadows and darkness. There was no strategy to make.
“Then you can choose whatever you want, Maxie. Tricks are all calculated, but magic…”
William stumbled to the left, stepping on the shadow hand.
The music clawed at his ears for one last time and stopped.
William looked at Wilson.
He knew what path to choose.
This moment, the claws tore out of the darkness and ate the flame like they would a heart. It was gone.
The silence was absolute. It felt like a blessing - William could think again.
Then, Wilson howled.
“Fire! We’ve got to light the fire!”
They both had flint and steel in their pockets. But what to burn? The darkness around felt like something more than the absence of light. It was the absence of matter.
A bitterly cold wind whistled close, making him smell dust.
Sparks flew in the darkness, a tiny weak flame shone, showing him the cloth of Wilson’s vest, his chin covered with black stubble, his trembling hands. One was bare and the other wrapped in a straw glove.
“Here, quick, we have to find something that-”
William stepped towards him. Something flew past his back, cold, hissing.
He leaped towards the light. It quivered. Wilson took off his second glove and threw the embers in. The flame grew stronger. They both knew how quickly it would go out.
William searched around for the fire pit. There had to be wood left, but the blurred shadows covered the ground. They had to make every moment count. He reached around with his foot. The fire pit was there, it had to be...
“Keep to the light, it-”
William stumbled over something. It fell with a familiar sound.
“Your pack!”
“Great!”
“No, wait, it won’t-”
“We won’t need it with no light!”
“-burn.”
All the way there, the snow flew onto the pack. In their ‘camp’ it stood in the wet wind from the sea. Now, it has fallen in the snow. It was too wet on the outside and too secure to push the embers in. Through the last flashes of light, Wilson pushed the dying flame into the open pocket where the folded map was.
The few moments in the dark were terrifying, but then the pocket glowed like a lamp and the wicker slowly gave in to the flame.
They traded glances and grabbed the pack at the same time, trying to both salvage the supplies and keep the weak flame going while they dragged it towards the fire pit. Of course, it was so close all this time. Why couldn’t they see it?
Maybe it wasn’t there when the darkness came.
In the darkness there was only dust… and them .
The darkness wouldn’t give in. The fire couldn't break it.
Too much blood. Too much smoke.
No, they just needed a few more seconds. A little more time.
In the blinking light of the campfire, William saw Wilson. The scientist was smiling tentatively, trying to say something. He was the only thing William saw untouched by the mist and the smoke. He almost smiled as well.
A freezing cold stabbed his heart, enveloped every ring of his chainmail, wrapped around him. Everything stilled. Even his blood seemed frozen in his arteries.
In the red darkness he saw Wilson hit something black, hanging in the air close to him. It fell away from the axe only to knit back together. It was awful, amorphous yet alive, claws and teeth jutting out everywhere.
Darkness.
William got thrown to the ground. Each hit was worse than the least. He turned on his back, praying not to touch the barely burning flame. If it went out, they were doomed.
It burned on, stable and strong, but the fire wasn’t like the usual. It was a ghost of a flame, transparent and immaterial, helpless against the shadows.
The shadows crowded over William. The twisted silhouettes covered the sky like pine trees, lost in the dark.
Claws and teeth.
No.
William gripped the sabre and leaped to his feet. The blade went through something that felt like water. The darkness weakened.
William growled and turned. The world was quaking. Not like when the cyclops deer walked over it, now its very framework trembled. It seemed to be about to crumble into dust.
Ice cold claws hit his chainmail, but they couldn’t freeze it any further. They slipped over his fingers, but the cut produced only a few drops of blood.
Shadows?
That was it?
That was the horrible creature?
“I’ve got a shadow, too.” William said or thought. He was enveloped in anger and insanity, cold and harsh as a winter’s night. He couldn’t hear his own voice. In the ghostly pale light of the fire, his shadow was swinging the sabre’s shadow.
It looked real in its hands.
The screech of the shadow sword came from two places at once. The claws and teeth from the darkness met the flesh and metal to match.
William leaped forward, attacking another shadow. Its claws almost reached Wilson’s neck.
They stood back to back, weapons in hands, looking around in search of the enemy. Smoke clouded. Another monster was about to appear.
But the world blinked, the darkness changing into grey dust. Then it came together again, throwing up the absolute absence of matter.
It wasn’t black. Nothingness had no color.
The wind howled.
This wasn’t a shadow.
The world clouded with black smoke, pulsing around the vacuum. William saw a familiar silhouette in the shaking dust.
“Charlie?” he whispered.
He didn’t remember her all that well, he knew so little, he didn’t even know
didn’t remember
what he’d done, what they’d done, and who made the first step, and who took them both down into the abyss.
Maybe it didn’t matter anymore.
“Ch- Charlie… It’s-It’s me, William… It’s me… Maxwell.”
The nothingness wasted no time.
William felt the despair rush in as he realised that even if this was - once - a woman, a girl he remembered and wanted to help, there was nothing left of her.
She was gone.
What he had was a chance not to repeat his own mistakes.
A strike came from nowhere
made out of nothingness
and sent Wilson flying to the side, away from the fire. It tore all the fabric off his back like a knife. A tendril - a hand? a paw? a part? of the creature appeared and wrapped around him. The creature forgot its first victim. William gathered his strength and howled, dragging the sabre up, trying to wound the emptiness. The blood dripping from his fingers hung in the air in scarlet tatters, like smoke. The world was falling apart.
Its very framework had crumbled into dust.
When William woke up, the dawn was breaking. Somehow, the fire survived, stubbornly eating at a branch.
He felt terrible, but that was not unusual at this point. He was surprised to see that the chainmail was gone, leaving a weak dark outline of its rings on his clothes.
The sabre was still there. William was still holding it.
Wilson was lying on the ground close by. He groaned. William could barely focus his vision on him. The world was brighter, but it wasn’t stable. The red mist still peppered his vision.
“You’ll live.” William said after a terribly long time he took to get up to check on Wilson. The wound on his back wasn’t as bad as he thought. Wilson got even luckier than the first time. At least this one wouldn’t give him much more scarring.
“The wall,” Wilson rasped, “the obelisks.”
William turned.
The black stones that blocked their way just yesterday were gone.
On the other side, through the untouched snow, he could see the savanna.
***
The map was gone, too, so they navigated by sun and memory. It’s a wonder how much memory can do, William thought. Wilson’s calculations were right. On day twelve the savanna ground became uneven, pitfalls and hills, ravines and rifts scattered across the landscape. At first they were small, but grew larger as the travelers walked on. It was as if the ground had created itself a short time ago.
They both knew it didn’t happen by itself.
These folds of twisted earth were full of life. It found a way, and the two of them were a part of the circle, a part of life, too. Once again, they hunted rabbits and birds, cut the plentiful grass and dug out wild carrots. In the evenings, William felt sated again. The campfires were bright and warm, and when the travelers felt it was not enough, they warmed each other up. William watched the sky. The sun seemed to stay for longer.
Moving forward became harder and harder. They had to scale one obstacle after another, losing time. Polar explorers, overcoming ice ridge after ice ridge.
Scott had been losing time, too, William thought, his new wicker backpack swinging on his shoulders. Or just counting it differently while traveling across the plane. In his mind, he added time to their journey. Yet, he knew that every hour of every day brought them closer to their goal. It made him feel stronger.
“There it is,” Wilson said. He climbed a tall ridge and turned to help William up. “See? Right there.”
William did see it.
The ground ahead was a mess. It was all almost vertical hurdles and rifts that seemed to go deep into the center of this world. Beyond that, farther still, there were the white and purple squares of the chess fields.
To reach the first square they wasted almost the entire day and four lengths of rope. It was their entire supply. They had to leave three of those where they tied them to.
The last hundred yards of their way was littered with bones. There, the ground had been torn apart and then pushed itself together. In its grip, there were ribcages, horned elongated skulls whitened by the winter, and heavy fibulae. “That’s beefalo”, Wilson said calmly, as he walked between them. The ground was lined with long shadows. William looked up, expecting to see bent, dry pine trees. Instead, on the hill nearby, he saw the thick, colossal lines of a ribcage.
The skull was further away. They walked underneath it, as if it was an arch, and slipped down the iced over jaw. From the ground, the teeth of the cyclops deer looked like broken marble columns.
William felt a jolt of fear when he walked by it. That fear followed him for a while, but in that moment it mixed and dissolved as anticipation took over. He’d always feared that the platform was gone. Feared going all this way and not being able to find it.
Wilson touched his shoulder. His fingers trembled.
Maybe he’d been afraid of that, too.
“I can’t believe it,” he said quietly. “William… I can’t believe it.”
It was right ahead, across a wide rift in the marble floor, surrounded with pitfalls. Narrow walkways crossed the gaps - fallen trees, broken columns, shattered marble. In the dying light of the sunset, there it was. A black silhouette across the sky. The unfinished thing.
It really did look like a gate from out there.
Something rumbled behind them. The ground shook.
Wilson grabbed his shoulder and yelled something. William turned. The mass of bones was shaking, wrapping itself in black mist. It lifted off the ground, struggled out. Half the savanna was moving.
“Oh hell… Finish the gate, Carter, I’ll distract it- them-!”
The axe was in his hand once again. William shrugged off the backpack and rustled through it, searching for the metal potato thing. He wanted to shout, to stop Wilson, but realised it was no use. Wilson did what he knew how to do well. William was afraid, but still believed in him.
It was time to do what he knew how to.
This time it was truly going to be his greatest magic trick.
He was scared that he’d be too late to put the last part in place. He was afraid of falling, of the walkways collapsing before he’d reach them. Before Wilson, left far behind, would reach them.
But they’d held.
It was very quiet on the platform. All the noise and the sounds, overwhelming with what was happening back there, were just gone.
The radio was on the edge. The handle was several times shorter, but the receiver itself was untouched. William wasn’t even surprised.
It’s a puzzle, he thought, picking up the radio, looking at the magic symbols crossing the pieces. A puzzle he’d once solved. In magic tricks, training and muscle memory could be more important than any other kind.
He placed the last piece into the gap in the middle and pushed it down, moving it left, to the symbol that looked like the letter “M”. The world trembled
the framework
but the Gate stood silent and still.
“Come on,” William exclaimed, desperate. He turned - the insanity behind him continued, filling up the sky. Smoke mixed with bone. He looked for the small figure holding an axe.
“Come on, come on-”
Any second could cost them Wilson’s life, and later his own. The monster of smoke and bone, a terrible mistake, ailing and wrong, wouldn’t stop at just one victim.
William wasn’t going to let it have that one, either.
“Captain Scott came back home,” William mumbled. His fingers were getting scratched bloody. The pieces barely moved, getting stuck on every line. The short handle refused to cooperate. “He came back.”
He tried to focus, to let his hands remember.
His greatest magic trick.
San-Francisco, he thought desperately.
Concentrated will, condensed to its limits.
His mind filled with the images of alleyways and dead ends. Now he knew he’d seen it all once. The world without fear.
Focus coming together with a different vector.
The world without hunger.
A demand.
A way to escape. A way out.
An order.
He reached into the top hat with both hands, grabbed the inside and pulled.
The gate lit up.
“Quick!” Someone shouted right next to him, and it was deafening. All the sounds came flooding back at once.
The world was dying.
It wasn’t about to go out quietly.
William kneeled in front of the gate. It opened, stretching the matter around it: a frame made of roaring light. With the last desperate leap, Wilson reached the platform. His left arm was bloody and loose, the axe and the backpack were gone. The marble collapsed behind him.
“William, you-”
William Carter, magician, pulled the world up by the ears and lifted it up in the air, showing it to the thundering crowd.
***
William blinked. The platform and the gate seemingly disappeared, along with the smoke, the chess fields and the debris. Instead, he was lying somewhere, looking up at the sky. It was blue and cloudless, framed by the grey walls. Underneath his strangely numb fingers he felt something cold and firm.
It was a sidewalk.
He turned his head and looked to the right, noting the fire escape and the trash can. It’s been so long since he last saw anything like it that those simple things seemed out of place.
Wilson was lying next to him, pale but still breathing. His eyelids moved. Wilson opened his eyes and froze.
Then he breathed out and said, very quietly, in complete disbelief:
“We did it. William, you- we escaped.”
“We escaped,” William repeated mechanically. He didn’t have the strength to get up.
“This is San-Francisco”, he noted silently. He knew it implicitly, it hummed in his blood. On the wall next to the fire escape, he saw a street sign. “Pathrow square”.
Judging by the sun's angle - god knows by now he was well versed in telling the time by the sun - it was a late afternoon.
“Why is it so quiet”, William thought. “San-Francisco is such a big city. It barely sleeps as is, and it should be rush hour now.”
He sat up, leaning on his elbows, and looked around feverishly - let there be just one person, just one car, just-
The street connecting to the dead end was deserted. He could see a row of empty shops and the signs over them: a barber’s shop, a launderette, a novelty shop, a cheap restaurant with an italian name. William has been there before, vague memories rose in his mind, but he couldn’t remember the name.
He couldn’t see it now, either.
The letters of the sign were covered with spider webs coming from a big den. It stood on the sidewalk and almost reached the sign in height.
William laid back down, almost falling. He felt Wilson’s hand find his and grip it tightly.
“We escaped,” Wilson said again. His smile was brighter than a firelight. It was warmer. He was looking at William, and only at him.
William breathed in and breathed out. He wanted to tell him what he’d seen. His grip tightened, and instead of the asphalt, he felt the warmth of another under his finders .
Or maybe he could wait a second or two. Just a couple of seconds. What’s a couple of seconds in a day for survivors like them?
They were lying on the sidewalk in a city as silent as death, and they were holding hands.
One. Two.