A Mountain Walked by Neil Gaiman & Thomas Ligotti & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Ramsey Campbell & W. H. Pugmire & Gemma Files & T. E. D. Klein & Cody Goodfellow

Author:Neil Gaiman & Thomas Ligotti & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Ramsey Campbell & W. H. Pugmire & Gemma Files & T. E. D. Klein & Cody Goodfellow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Dark Regions Press
Published: 2015-11-18T06:00:00+00:00

Daylight inched across the sky like a caterpillar through dirt. Frozen on the stairs of the university library was a young boy. His clothes unraveled, thread by thread, and fell to the cement. Leaves floated from the pavement to the trees.

Coating everything: spores of ancient molds; shadows of spent time vibrating against intoxicating prisms of potential futures; festering pustules of bacteria and greenish gel. A foul sourness. An eerie whine.

The mold that grew beneath Witch House.

A rumble, and I turned; and the bricks of the library crumbled to dust. Beeber picked me up, then Myna, and held us close to his chest. His heart was loud and uneven. The dust formed again into bricks, and now the library was lopsided but otherwise looked the same; and then it happened all over again: the bricks crumbled and re-formed, and the library again was a shadow of its former self.

Myna squirmed in Beeber's arms. “Let’s get back to Witch House. Let’s do something before the whole world falls apart.”

Professor Beeber’s fire-glazed face shifted slightly, became hard and deeply lined, somehow more angular. Then his face shifted again, and this time his too-tight grin split and buckteeth protruded from his lips. “If there’s an infinite possibility of things going wrong—and you two have somehow triggered it—then there’s also an infinite possibility of things going right. But how do we trigger whatever it is that makes things go right?”

I tried to analyze the situation. I funneled particles through my quantum wells and came up with the composition of current reality: “Dense concentration of hadrons, which are decaying quickly into leptons. Strange quarks and charmed quarks combining into new hadrons—”

And that’s when disaster hit.

The boy’s feet sprouted roots that drilled through the cement and held him fast to the ground. The trees joined limbs and their roots tap danced across the pavement.

Beeber dropped us and fell to the pavement, clutching his chest.

Myna’s skin cracked open. Her blood clotted around the lips of her wounds. I didn’t understand what was happening, I hadn’t finished my calculations. The world was falling apart, and everything I loved was dying. My fat oozed around Myna, and I held her tightly to my humps. Infection bubbled in the deep pocks that riddled her flesh like bullet holes. Her body was hot, her breath faint.

Yellow flowers twinkled like little suns, then exploded in big bangs. Moisture dripped from Myna’s wounds, the water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen.

“Help me …” Beeber’s voice; a hiss through toothless gums and flabby lips.

I slid Myna to the pavement. She moaned.

I hated to leave her—I hated it!—but someone had to save Beeber.

I leapt onto his chest and bounced as high as I could. Up and down I went, my footpods suctioned over his heart, my coiled legs stretching to their maximum limit, my body springing wildly up, then crashing down again.

His face was red, then purple, then blue. His lips gurgled unintelligible words; prayers perhaps to an unknown god.

“Come on, Beeber, you can’t die!”

I pounded his