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Show 397 There was no escape. He ran for miles once when something cold brushed the back of his neck and when he stopped, panting and gasping, he was startled to find he was farther from the string of white cliffs he had been running toward than when he had started. Familiar shapes were locked into ice lakes that he crossed, staring up at him and blinking behind frozen bubbles. Voices whispered close to his ear, but he could never make out what they were saying. He climbed through a tangle of ivy into a garden where a pea vine clung to its scaffolding of wires like a dead prisoner. It shuddered when he bumped into the post that held the wires and a shower of hard black peas dropped from the ends of the pods. Suspecting he would be seen if he stayed, he looked for a way out and spotted a flagstone path leading out from the squash patch, but he was too wily to take it. It led around a corner marked by a white trellis and he knew what was standing there just out of sight, waiting for him. Instead, he feinted left and vaulted over the irrigation ditch, where they would never find him, and ran, glancing back over his shoulder, until he stumbled over the body of a dead angel picked to bone and jerky by the birds that lived in the cliffs. The rags that remained of the white robe fluttered from the cold white sand that half-covered the grinning and eyeless face. A faint vaporous light, nearly inert, still hung in the air around the parchment-covered skull, and by looking closely he could see wispy traces of other forms in it, oval glints of sunlight and iridescent spokes shifting in and out of each other. He put his finger close to the glow and watched it flicker weakly against his knuckle, when suddenly a toothy boy of about twelve sprang from behind a dune and hit him in the stomach. The blow took him by surprise and he fell down, taking the boy with him. They rolled on the sand, each trying to get a thumb into the other's eye, and Lorin was so absorbed in |
