The coolness of Wish's hands on my cheek and forehead eased me back into awareness of the physical world, and the reality I was most familiar with. I opened my eyes, blinked a few times in confusion, realized where I was, reached up and drew Wish down to me. She came eagerly, almost in tears in her relief that I was all right.
It took us a while to get through with the kiss. When I could finally sit up and see straight again, I looked around, and found Running Fox and Burnett sitting up beside me. Burnett rubbed his shoulder, right where the basilisk had gashed him, and cheered, "We did it!"
I was glad to see that there was no damage to his physical body to correspond to the damage done to his astral body, but he moved as if he'd taken every bit of that damage physically. Come to think of it, I hurt all over, too. Every place my astral body had sustained damage hurt on my physical body as well, even though there were no obvious signs of damage. I wasn't at all sure I was going to be able to stand up and walk. The bones in my arms and legs hurt ferociously, after the punishment my astral lion-body had taken trying to stop the basilisk from getting to Burnett.
I glanced around at Running Fox. He was climbing to his feet, moving as if every joint in his body hurt, and wanted to creak out loud. He rubbed the back of his neck and groaned, "I am just getting too old for this sort of thing! I am going to hurt for a month!"
Burnett creaked to his own feet and chuckled, "Same here---but imagine how much the late and lamented Nicodemus Castevet has to be hurting, right now."
A strange look flashed across Running Fox's face. He sat back down abruptly and began laughing...so hard and so helplessly that tears streamed down his face.
Wish and I got to our feet, and we all gathered around the roaring Indian, wondering what in the world was wrong with him...?
He finally ran down. As we helped him to his feet again, Burnett asked, "Greg, what in blue blazes was that all about?"
Running Fox wiped the last of the tears of laughter from his eyes and chuckled, "I am sorry, Samuel. It is just that when you mentioned how Nicodemus Castevet must be feeling, just now, I experienced a vision of him. He was standing before the Great Old One, back in that other universe, being condemned for failing so miserably in his mission."
We all burst out laughing. When I could speak intelligibly again, I gasped, "Oh, God, what a thought! Castevet on the carpet before his boss, getting reamed royally for blowing his assignment! I hope he gets the demotion of all demotions for it!"
Running Fox chuckled dryly and assured me, "From what I could understand of the exchange, Castevet has been consigned to the equivalent of mopping floors and cleaning toilets in the men's room of a bus station in Siberia for the next three thousand years. We are not likely to hear from him again for a long, long time."
I pulled myself together and started across the pasture toward the road, and Running Fox's truck, towing Wish along by one hand. "It's the least of what he deserves. Now, let's go see if we can get Tommy and Razor out of that hole in the ground."
As it turned out, we didn't need to worry about that. Just as we pulled up near the abandoned overpass, Tommy and Razor came stumbling out of the cave mouth. Razor looked as if he'd just sat through a marathon re-showing of every episode of The Outer Limits ever made---while stoned out of his alleged mind on something decidedly illegal. Tommy, on the other hand, looked like death warmed over---and then touched up by a mortuary cosmetologist to give him that "lifelike look". And he was squinting, hard, and shading his eyes with a hand as if the daylight was agonizing to them.
We all scrambled from the truck and hurried to them as fast as we could get our aching bodies to move. Wish, being the only uninjured one of the lot, beat everyone else to them and almost knocked them over with the enthusiasm of her greeting. She didn't bother with Razor, of course---she - almost - couldn't have cared less about him---but she hit Tommy with a bear hug that almost wiped him off his feet, and he stumbled into Razor in the process.
We were all glad to see Tommy in one piece of course. He'd saved our collective hides with that surprise attack on Castevet. But it was a real jolt to Wish and me when Tommy told us that Razor, of all people, had been partially responsible for Tommy's part in our victory.
Maybe there was some hope for the butthead after all...?
We hustled them back to the truck and got them up into the load bed before Tommy collapsed. Once they were settled onto the pile of gunny sacks, Running Fox turned back to the overpass thoughtfully and grunted, "We're going to need some dynamite."
Everyone turned to him in surprise. Burnett gulped, "Huh? Why?"
I caught on. "Simple; that negative Vortex is too dangerous to risk leaving that cave mouth open. Any poor, unsuspecting sap who wanders by here could spot that opening, investigate it out of curiosity, and come to some fate too horrible to contemplate. The only way to keep that from happening is to collapse that cave mouth so that no one can get into the thing. But, where can we get dynamite? This isn't exactly a cartoon, where anyone can lay his hands on a stick of TNT at a moment's notice. You have to be trained to handle explosives, and licensed to handle them, and..."
I trailed off as another thought occurred to me. The others looked around, wondering why I'd stopped in mid-sentence.
Wish murmured, "Uh-oh...I know that look. The only thing missing is the light bulb floating above his head."
She grabbed me by the shirtfront and mock-growled, "Okay, husband o' mine, what's cooking?"
I looked around at the old bulldozer that had been abandoned at the construction site. "When Running Fox sent me back to my last incarnation to absorb the knowledge and learning I'd gained in that lifetime, it worked; better than any of us expected, I think. I only spent a few minutes there, but I absorbed - and more importantly, I remember - everything I learned in that lifetime. Sir Alfred had been teaching Alex the art of the Spirit Flight: what we call telekinesis and levitation, these days. And Alex tried to use that Gift to rescue Bridget and Sir Alfred from a burning barn. The problem was, Alex was too close to Bridget. The fact that she was in mortal danger from the fire distracted him so badly that he couldn't maintain his focus, and because of that he wasn't able to get out of the way in time when a burning beam fell on him. That was what cost him his life; that was why Shaun warned us not to face Castevet together. Castevet knew about the weakness, and he would have used it against us if we'd tried to tackle him as a team."
Wish looked a little ill. "If Uncle Alfred could levitate, why didn't he use it to get us out of the barn?"
I shook my head sadly. "During his last contact with Alex, he was coughing violently. He was too weakened by smoke poisoning to manage it."
I looked back at the bulldozer. "Sir Alfred had taught Alex a new technique in levitation just the day before the fire. He hadn't had time to learn how to use it properly, but in combination with what I've learned in this lifetime, and what I learned while fighting Castevet on the astral plane, I just might be able to pull this off."
Burnett favored me with a puzzled look. "What could you have learned while we were butting heads with that monster?"
I shrugged. "It's hard to explain. I just know what I know, and while I was scratching and biting and clawing with Castevet, things kept getting jarred loose inside me. I kept growing, gaining strength and power, a little at a time. I wore myself out a lot faster that I gained power, though, and he almost beat all of us. If it hadn't been for the Professor, and Tommy, Wish might be the only one of us left alive, now."
Wish shuddered at the thought. I swear she turned a pale shade of chartreuse. But she said nothing.
Tommy grunted, "So, you're thinkin' you can pick that old hunka iron up and ram it into the cave mouth?"
I shrugged. "I don't know, but I can try. If it works, it will seal the cave moth permanently, and there'll be no need to go through all the legal rigamarole of hiring a contractor to seal the thing. The fewer people who know about this place, the better."
Running Fox nodded grimly. "Curiosity kills more than cats. That open cave mouth would be like cheese to a hungry mouse."
Burnett nodded in turn. "Besides, if we got through legal channels, it could take weeks to talk the paper-pushers into doing it. No telling what kind of trouble could crop up in the meantime."
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and murmured, "Okay, gang---make like this is a library."
In a completely lost tone, Razor asked, "Huh?"
Even though my eyes were closed, I could see everyone turn to him and put a finger to their lips. "Sshhh!!!"
I thought back to what I'd absorbed from my past-life self, shifted mental gears and reached out to the bulldozer. I curled my mental grip around it, tightened it, took a deep breath---and lifted.
It rose a few inches from the ground, but it was too heavy; my grip slipped, and it dropped back to the ground with a sodden crunch.
Razor made a high-pitched, sick sound, kind of like a puppy about to throw up.
I let my breath out, and thought back again. Sir Alfred's words came to me: "When the object to be moved is too large for you to grip properly, remember, Alex; Be The Giant."
The words weren't the important part; it was the concept behind them that mattered. While size is an ironclad limitation for the physical body, it's a virtually meaningless concept for the astral form. It's possible to shift scale, and therefore your size relative to everything else around you, simply by willing it to be so---if you know how to go about it. And most importantly, your capability remains consistent with your current scale. If you have the necessary Gift, and you can handle the concepts involved in shifting scale at the necessary magnitudes, you could literally shift scale to the point where the planet Earth was the size of a marble relative to you, pick the planet up and use it as an aggie. Of course, even if you did have that kind of capability, I wouldn't recommend trying it. After all, your physical body's still going to be on the planet, along with everyone else's. Trashing the planet would literally be the last mistake you ever made, because your body would be destroyed right along with it.
Some people maintain that there is no right and wrong in the grand scale of the universe---only consequences. I disagree. There is right and wrong in the universe, because I've done personal combat with evil and its consequences. Nonetheless, I can vouch for the "consequences" part of things in this respect: You have to take care in what you do, no matter how weak you think yourself or how powerful you really are. The consequences of even your most inconsequential-seeming actions have a way of reaching out far beyond your expectations, and sometimes even beyond your ability to believe. When this domino effect kicks in at its worst, a child sneezing next door to you can - in theory, at least - reult in a government toppling on the other side of the world a week later.
I took another deep breath, let it out slowly, locked my knees---and went astral. It was the very first time I'd tried it in this life without lying down and having someone help me...but as Alex, I'd been an old hand at it. I had no trouble this time.
And then I shifted scale. I stopped at a height of fifty feet, looked around, and discovered that Wish, Running Fox, Burnett and Tommy were all staring up at me in amazement. Obviously, they could see me. Razor, on the other hand, was staring at them as if he thought they'd all lost their minds. It was clear that he couldn't see what they were seeing.
I flashed those who could see me a smile, bent over, wrapped my hand around the bulldozer, and lifted.
It resisted, but it moved. It came up off the ground, slowly and reluctantly. Even at giant scale, the thing was heavy.
Back there on the truck, Razor let out a high-pitched squeak, his eyes bugged out---and then he went over like a felled tree, out cold. It was just too much for him.
Everyone else just looked like they were on the carnival ride of their lives.
I gritted my teeth, stepped forward, and swung the bulldozer like a bowling ball. It came out and up. I released it...and dropped out of astral to my normal state again, opening my eyes to watch the results of my efforts.
The bulldozer arced across the intervening space, sailed in under the overpass neatly and cleanly, and hit the cave mouth dead center.
The crash was defeaning. The cave mouth all but imploded on impact. Improbably, the bulldozer bounced like a rubber ball and came to rest halfway back out from under the overpass. When the dust settled enough for us to see the impact site again, we found that the cave mouth had been sealed off so effectively that it would take major excavation work to open it again.
And then, as if deliberately making absolutely certain that no one was going to be getting into that negative Vortex anytime before the next millennium, the old, never-completed overpass collapsed on top of the sealed cave mouth.
By the time the second cloud of dust began to settle, it was obvious that no one was going to be getting into that cave for a long, long time, if ever. There was no trace of the cave mouth left, now. And even the remains of the bulldozer were half-buried under the collapsed overpass.
I turned to the others, meaning to say something to them about a job well-done, and almost went down on my face.
I'd had no idea I was that wrecked!
Burnett and Running Fox caught me in time, and carried me back to the truck.
By the time I could see straight again we were halfway back to Abime, and Wish was cuddled up next to me, looking worried sick.
I chuckled, kissed her, and assured her, "I'll be okay, sweetie. I just need about a week's sleep and enough food and drink to satisfy a football team."
Tommy let out a sigh of relief and slapped me on the shoulder. "Man, am I glad to hear that! If you hadn't made it, Shaun might as well have left us down there in that cavern, because there'd be no livin' with Wish!"
Apparently Razor had come to while I was recovering from the overexertion, because he cleared his throat and ventured, "Uh, if what you're tellin' me about everyone havin' a Guardian's true, then why didn't ours pop in 'n help us while we were down there in that hole?"
Tommy looked around uncertainly. "Yeah, come to think of it, why didn't they?"
Wish looked around, suddenly, and a peculiar look spread across her face. I retuned my perceptions just in time to catch a glimpse of Shaun's near-aura glow fading away in front of her. He'd obviously popped in and laid some profound revelation on her.
After a few seconds, she murmured, "Of course! They were with you, but they couldn't show themselves to you because they were transferring most of their strength to Shaun so that he could manifest himself visibly and audibly enough to lead you two back out of the cavern! As it was, they used up so much of their strength allowing him to be seen and heard when he had to tell Tommy to join the battle that they almost didn't have strength enough left to allow him to lead them the rest of the way out after Nicodemus was defeated!"
A look of wonder spread across her face, and she added, "In fact, it took so much strength to manage it that it took the combined power of seven Guardians to manage it---Dad's, Rain's, Tommy's, Razor's, Sam's, Greg's, and mine! As it was, they barely managed to hold out until Tommy and Razor came within sight of the light coming in through the cave mouth, and the boys were able to get the rest of the way out on their own."
Tommy grunted, "That explains why the footprints we were followin' faded out short of the entrance. Good thing they didn't run down before we got to where we could see some outside light."
Razor let out a sound that came unpleasantly close to being a whisper and moaned, "Oh, man---I get the feelin' I gotta lotta stuff to learn!"
Tommy let out a sepulchral chuckle. When he showed no signs of explaining the reason for the action, Wish poked him gently and asked, "Okay---what are you laughing about, in the middle of all this grimness?"
He grinned macabrely and nodded back in the general direction of the overpass. "Imagine the fun the authorities're gonna have, tryin' to figure out how a bulldozer with a blown-up engine moved almost a hundred yards from where it was abandoned to under that old overpass; and why the overpass came down on it, even though there was no explosion and no earthquake."
All of us laughed and winced a little at the thought.
Running Fox chuckled, "I imagine they will list it as 'unsolved'; if they bother to make an official report of the matter at all. Law enforcement agancies tend to take a dim view of being forced to investigate cases that smack of things that go bump in the night."
We never did make it to New Orleans in time for the performance. Even if we had, we wouldn't have been in any condition to play that night. Ed had to reschedule everything.
At least we were still alive...right?