The House Between the Worlds by Bradley Marion Zimmer

Author:Bradley, Marion Zimmer [Bradley, Marion Zimmer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780345316462
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 1980-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Fenton's first reaction was pure panic.

His body was gone, had been taken away—dead? Years ago he had read a horror story in which a man, dead and buried, did not know he was dead, and wandered for years among the living, unable to make them hear his voice, unable to touch anything… It had been the author's version of hell. But a moment's thought brought him back to sanity. He had, after all, been away a long time, and when Garnock found that he did not come back to consciousness in the usual time, he had him taken to a hospital. Reason told him it would be the hospital on campus, Cowell Hospital. It would not be the first time a laboratory experiment had gone wrong…

But he was so tired, so racked with recurrent pain… Fenton let himself collapse into Garnock's chair. Predictably he went through it, landed on the floor and began to sink frighteningly through that too. Hastily he recollected himself… he could walk on the floor, or appear to, in whatever insubstantial physical form his body had now, if he kept concentrating on it. But he was so tired, it was such an effort to concentrate…

Fenton made a very serious attempt to collect his thoughts. He was really beginning to be frightened now. He was not sure what would happen to him in this present form if he was trapped outside his body too long, but he was very, very sure he didn't want to find out!

The first thing, obviously, was to get back to his body. Next time, he thought, clutching the talisman in his pocket, next time when I go into that world I am going to take my body with me! I've had enough of being a 'tweenman!

As he stumbled painfully down out of Smythe Hall, he thought with longing of the world of the Alfar, with the landscape that shifted and flowed, and could be travelled more quickly with will and concentrating on your destination. Now he was aware that his body—now flickering and wavering to his conscious sight, and feeling far less substantial—was tugging at him by means of the cord connecting him to it. The cord was a fine greyish substance which seemed to extend from somewhere about the middle of his body—he didn't know just where it was fastened, but he thought it was about his navel, and it felt like it—and which extended off in the distance. Fenton was beginning to feel almost delirious; he wondered whether it could get snagged on anything and what would happen to it if it did.

Down the stairs of Smythe Hall, stumbling, recurrently racked with spasms of pain. Across the deserted campus, stumbling in desperate haste, once taking a shortcut through the corner of a building because it was quicker than going around. The building felt rough and grainy, painful to his insubstantial skin. Stabbing pains seized him and he had to fall to his knees repeatedly, ignoring the insistent tugging, like an itch inside his belly, from the cord, and try to massage the pain out of his calves and feet.

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