It was decided: based on what little information Donald Sanderson was able to provide, the source of the Second Deluge and the key to stopping the spectral menace was the entity known as "Grandmother". And the only way to get to Grandmother was to enter the "true" underworld, the place that Samuel Magabe and PROJECT: BLACK MERCURY had tried — and so far failed — to breach.
Preparations began immediately. With the help of Senator Richard Boyle, all surviving Orpheus employees were given clearance for PROJECT: BLACK MERCURY, and their base of operations was moved to the Price Research Facility, where the phase convergence device was developed.
Working with government researchers, Neel Shivani quickly determined that the device could be used as an amplifier for certain types of projector emanations, allowing the membrane between worlds to be breached. However, skimmer-class projectors were at a distinct disadvantage, as direct exposure to the necrotic energies of the underworld caused a sort of psychic feedback to travel up the silver cord, damaging the sleeping body. All skimmer-class projectors would have to be placed in cryogenic suspension creches, which would keep their physical bodies protected but leave them unable to "ripcord" back if anything went wrong.
The Agents made their individual preparations to go. Kate Hennisson volunteered to go along (although her physical body was crippled, her projected spirit would function as well as it ever had), and asked Angela Delafont to remain behind and continue leading Orpheus Group after she was gone. Cheryl Banning volunteered as well, and planned to project by taking a deliberate overdose of pigment. Agent Herschler was concerned that everyone should be fully aware of the risks and implications of the mission. Agent Morrisson seemed to believe that none of them would be coming back, and seemed to take a perverse glee in this prediction. Agent Li Xianjin was nervous and distracted. Agent Lane forgave his father, and the two reconciled with a hug. Shivani told Agent MacMillian that he wouldn't try to talk her out of going, but then couldn't finish his thought... in the end he simply kissed her good-bye.
At the zero hour, eight living Agents — Hennisson, Banning, Li, Morrisson, Herschler, MacMillian, McGee, and Lane — and two ghosts — Agent Watts and Donald Sanderson — gathered in the test chamber. Herschler asked each person in turn if they were ready for this; only Agent Li wordlessly turned and walked out of the room.
Those who were not already ghosts got into their sleeper creches — except for Banning, who lay down on a skimmer's couch. Shivani checked the readouts on every creche, and personally administered the pigment dose to Banning. Once everyone had projected, he double-checked the settings of the phase convergence device.
Then, after a final word of encouragement and a spoken countdown, he activated the device.
The Agents found themselves in the center of a wasteland. An endless, flat desert of gray ash and grit. The sky was the color of tarnished pewter.
Donald Sanderson had vanished.
Nearby a single structure broke the horizon's line. The low, rambling, clapboard building covered in faded and peeling paint. The single entrance was built to look like the mouth of an enormous, screaming, clown's face. Over the mouth, a sign: "The Hall of Truth." Someone had written with black spraypaint the letters "UN" in front of the final word.
It was the funhouse that had disappeared from the Farther Shores Amusement Park two years ago, when Orpheus Agents had attempted to raid the place.
Next to the entrance was a glass-enclosed kiosk, like the automated fortune-telling machines sometimes seen at fairs. Inside, Darryl Milton, former co-leader of the long-defunct Blasphemers, stood slumped against the grimy glass.
Though drained of most of his vitality and evidently in great pain, Milton was unwilling to give the Agents much information. "Forgive me," he rasped, "but being needlessly cryptic is the only satisfaction I have at this point." He told them that the "White Man" (or, alternately, the "Man in White") had put him in this box. He seemed grimly amused at the idea of what the Agents would find inside the hall of mirrors. "What's your fortune?" he wheezed. "Your fortune is that you're all fucked."
They left him to his pathetic fate. But Agent Morrisson, who was the last to pass through the door into the building, paused. "Thank you, for telling my fortune," he murmured, and then spoke a killing word. Darryl Milton's skin cracked and shrunk down to his bones, and with a final cough of dust, he collapsed inside his glass coffin.
Inside, the Agents were quickly separated in the labyrinth of mirrors and glass.
Emma MacMillian saw herself standing next to the image of Neel Shivani. Behind him stood Walter Hanley and Doug Sands. Further back stood a uniformed SWAT police officer and a corporate security guard. And behind all of them, half in shadow, stood her husband. MacMillian's reflection reached out to her with an open hand.
"It's bullshit," MacMillian whispered, and walked away.
Holland Lane saw the mouldering skeleton of a child, a blue plastic ID bracelet on its wrist. Hiding behind the skeleton, peeking over its shoulder and propping up its limbs like a string-cut marionette, Lane's own reflection looked back at him. The reflection reached out its hand.
Lane took it.
Robert Herschler saw a montage of scenes: he saw himself breaking Samuel Magabe's knees with a fire extinguisher, watching the crippled man struggle to crawl away as he burned. He saw himself shoot Ross Camblin and then stand idly by as the record producer bled to death on the floor of a parking garage. He saw himself puppeteer Phillip Nash, force him to put a gun in his mouth, and let the hammer fall. He looked up at himself, grinned, and held out his hand.
Herschler shook his head and walked away.
Brett Morrisson did not see himself at all; instead, he saw a gray-haired man dressed as a mildly eccentric academic: tweed jacket, patches on the elbows, a pipe between his teeth. The old man smiled and held out his hand.
"Don't worry; I'm here to free you," whispered Brett, and took the man's hand.
Michael Watts looked down at an open grave, its root-tangled bottom littered with fragments of blackened bone. Nothing reached out to him.
"Sad, isn't it?" said a voice. The Man In the White Suit stood behind him, smiling amiably. "Hello," he said. "You're Watts, of course. I'm so glad to have the opportunity to meet you. I am the Board of Directors. Or the last surviving member, at any rate."
He held out his hand.
Moved by an impulse he could not quite understand, Watts took the man's hand, then fell back through the mirror, towards the open grave.
"Whoa there, careful!" the Man In the White Suit laughed, easily picking Watts up and setting him on his feet. "That's just what they want you to do. But that's not you down there," he said, waving scornfully at the remains in the pit. "You don't have to accept that. You can be more than that.
"Listen," the Man In the White Suit continued, "we have a common enemy, you and I."
"The albino," said Watts.
"Indeed," said the Man In the White Suit. "It is in here with us, in the cente of the labyrinth. Your friends are in danger, and I need your help. Will you help me defeath this thing?"
Watts nodded.
The Man In the White Suit smiled. "Good."
The other Agents, both those who had taken the hands of their reflections and those who had refused, found themselves in a large room in the center of the labyrinth. There were no mirrors here; rough black cloth covered the walls. The floor was dust-covered wooden boards. Through the center of the room ran a recessed track, dropped two or three feet below the level of the floor. On the track sat a pair of roller-coaster cars. Leaning on the forward car was the albino.
"I have to tell you a story," he was saying. "It is a very old story. Unfortunately the rules under which I am forced to operate stipulate a certain... indirectness in what I am about to tell you. I am sorry for this. But you must listen now, and you must listen very carefully.
"Long ago, before history, the world of the living and the world of the dead existed in harmony with each other, part of a greater balance. Souls passed painlessly and fearlessly from one to the other, each though their cycles, and the dead bore no grudge against the living.
"Until one day a terrible injury was perpetrated, and the balance was shattered. A barrier grew between the worlds of the living and the dead. Souls passing through were trapped in between places, unable to complete their journeys, tossed upon an endless and formless tempest.
"Then came one soul who was more powerful than the rest. He was able to exercise his will upon the chaos. He calmed the tempest and brought forth land, and there he built a city. It was a refuge for those souls lost between places, and soon it grew to be an empire, a land where the dead could rest, and dwell, and even after a fashion rule.
"But though the empire grew vast and strong, it was built upon a fundamental imprefection. Beneath the City of Black Iron was the crack, the injury. This was Grandmother, the Grand Maw, the bottomless well of seething spite that sought to devour the world. I would never rest until what was left of the balance was dragged into oblivion. It would never rest until everything Was Not."
The albino stopped; the others looked around. Michael Watts and the Man In the White Suit had entered the room.
Watts raised his enshrouded shotgun, but MacMillian stepped in between him and the albino.
Behind him, the Man In the White Suit unbuttoned his jacked, and from his abdomen poured a mass of viscious, inky blackness. A shadow began to rise from the Man In the White Suit, a shadow that MacMillian had seen once before.
Watts turned and fired the shotgun; the black mass extended a pseudopod and swatted him aside. Herschler attempted to grapple the thing and burn it with ghost-fire, but the thing impaled him and effortlessly flicked him across the room. Morrisson spoke the killing word, and part of the thing's mass turned brittle and sloughed off, but still it rolled forward and slammed into the albino, knocking him off his feet.
The albino rose to his hands and knees. His head hung limply; his hat had fallen off. Beneath the white fedora, his head was perfectly bald, his skin powder-white except for a line of puckered, pink scar tissue that ran from the top of his scalp down the back of his head, and down below the color of his shirt.
The scar stretched, and began to split.
The albino's entire upper torso split lengthwise with a sticky, tearing sound. Rows and rows of tiny, hooked teeth lined the separate halves of the scar. From his abdomen uncurled an enormous tongue, thick as a man's leg and tipped with a cluster of black thorns. The tongue lashed out, wrapped around the black shadow-shape's middle, and dragged it into the great, sideways maw. Then the two torso-halves snapped shut, and the scar healed itself over.
The albino stood up, brushed the dust off his white pants, and carefully replaced his hat upon his head.
To the astonished Agents, he said, "Terribly sorry. When I devoured the rest of the Board of Directors, that last one managed to get away. The trouble with very old ghosts is that they tend to become short-sighted and extremely self-absorbed, but of course beyond that the circle had been compromised for many years. They had to go.
"Where was I?
"Ah, yes. Do you still have the key?"
McGee nodded and held it up for everyone to see.
"Good. That key will unlock the Gate Between Life and Death. There you will find what will assuage Grandmother's hunger — not completely, but enough to restore a measure of balance and save what can be saved.
"I am permitted to warn you that doing so may require you to sacrifice everything you are. Some of you are prepared to do this; others are not. Nevertheless, the task falls to you.
"Now go. Follow the landmarks to the City of Black Iron; the key will show you the rest of the way."
The albino stepped back and gestured towards the roller-coaster cars.
"Who are you?" Watts asked.
"I enact the will of the Lady of Fate," the albino said, with a nod.
When everyone had boarded, the cars began to move. They rolled out of the central room, into a dark tunnel. All light faded...
And then they found themselves outside once more. The Hall of (Un)Truth was gone. The waste land was gray and empty, with only a single black speck on the horizon to show the way forward.
The Agents began walking towards it.