back, put a hand beneath Tachyon's elbow. "Hurry"
It was harder going down. Eventually Tachyon just sat down and slid. Her dress and hands were stained with bloatblack.
She looked back up the wall of flesh. "No, Peanut, I've got to do it. I've got to go back. I can't leave him with my word broken."
"No, Doctor, we've gotta go. It'll hurt him worse if you get caught."
They stepped through the secret door. The last sound Tachyon heard was a boy weeping.
Eventually fear can kill you. It starts by sapping the will and turning the body into a shivering sickly husk. Tach had reached that state. Without the support of Peanut's arm, she could never have reached the chamber in which they now stood. In another lifetime she would have shrunk from that rough contact. But she had endured the sweating, stinking, flaccid mound that was Bloat, and she had felt his love and his despair. She had been assaulted by the physical beauty that was Blaise and known his hate.
"It doesn't matter," she whispered as she sank down on the glittering sand that formed the floor of the cavern chamber. "What, Doctor?"
She looked up at him. The sad, sad eyes, the chiseled wrinkles about that slit of a mouth.
"Peanut... you're a very handsome man."
"No, Doctor, I'm a joker." Bending, he held out his single hand to her. "You rested enough? Can you go on? That Blaise ... he knows we're running."
The tinkling of falling water drew her attention. She looked and located the source. "Let me bathe my face and hands. That will help."
"Okay," said Peanut dubiously.
The water was icy cold, but it revived her like a slap. She looked down at her dress, gave a little mew of disgust, and pulled it over her head. Immersed it beneath the tiny waterfall that had first attracted her. The waters of the pool were soon fouled and darkened with the bloatblack. She put the dress back on, shivering at its clammy touch, but at last she was clean, and the stink was gone.
They kept walking. Tachyon slid a hand into Peanut's. He looked back and smiled. Striations of mica in the rock walls threw off a soft phosphorescent glow. Tachyon was no geologist, but she didn't think that mica could do that. Elaborate stalagmites and stalactites yearned for each other from the floors and ceilings of the caverns, their colors shell pink, sea green, amber.
"Peanut, Ellis Island isn't a real island," Tach said conversationally. They were passing another underground grotto, and on a whim Tach kicked a small pebble into the mirror-like water. The reflected stalagmites and stalactites bowed and swayed like stony dancers.
Forehead buckling with a frown that made the horny skin erupt like the earth in an earthquake, Peanut said, "But it's surrounded by water."
"That's not what I mean. It was made from landfill. There can't be caverns like this beneath its surface."
"But they're here," said Peanut with a blunt practicality that made Tachyon's intellectual maunderings seem inane. Tachyon nodded, shrugged, but only made it through part of the action because she saw the spider. The size of a coffee table, it was stalking deliberately through the caverns, its eight multijointed legs making a horrible creaking sound. A tiny mew of fear made it past her blocked throat.
Peanut followed her terrified gaze. Adding a cocky swing to his normally stiff, blundering walk, Peanut strolled over and ran his hand through the body of the arachnid. It broke apart like stirred oil, globules of ectoplasmic spider floating in all directions.
"Don't worry, it's not real. None of 'em are real. You see things down here. Monsters and people, and just plain things. I think this is the place where nightmares live."
"Whose?" asked Tach a little breathlessly.
"Maybe everybody's in the whole world. Maybe just ours-us on the Rox, I mean."
"Then my nightmares..."
"Oh, there're probably a few sneaking around," answered the joker.
It was an intriguing thought, and Tach searched for these fragments of self. There was a strange sense of deja vu when she finally spotted one because she so clearly recalled the dream that had given birth to this sad-faced phantom. Cody, lost, crying-so strange because Tachyon couldn't recall ever having seen Cody cry. Adding to the grotesquerie-the tears were slipping from beneath her eye patch but not from the normal healthy eye. She was in her green surgical scrubs, a giant bloodstain directly over the crotch.
"Don't let them hurt me. Keep him away from me. Don't let him hurt me again."
The phantom