Nightside 05 - Paths Not Taken

cold eye and her cold expression, and nodded briefly.
    "You know I love you, right?" I said.
    "Oh sure," she said. "And I care for you, John. As much as I can."
    And then we both looked round sharply. The whole forest had gone quiet, and there was a new feeling on the air. Just for a moment everything was so still I could hear the rasp of my own breathing, feel the beating of my heart. Suzie and I looked out into the clearing, our attention drawn to the open space like beasts in the wild sensing a coming storm. There was a sound. A sound on the air, but not of it, coming from everywhere and nowhere. It filled the whole world, filled my mind, and it was not a natural sound. It was the cry of something being born, of something dying, an emotion and an experience and an ecstasy beyond human knowledge or comprehension. The sound rose and rose, growing louder and more piercing and more inhuman, until Suzie and I had to clap our hands over our ears to try and keep it out, and still the sound rose and rose, louder and louder, until it became unbearable; and still it rose. Finally, mercifully, it rose beyond our ability to hear it, and Suzie and I were left shaking and shuddering, breathing harshly and shaking our heads as though trying to clear something out. I couldn't hear anything, even when Suzie spoke to me, and we both looked out into the clearing again. Something was going to happen. We could feel it. We could still feel the sound, feel it in our bones and in our souls.
    And then Lilith was suddenly there, standing in front of the trees at the edge of the clearing, perhaps as little as twenty feet from where Suzie and I stood watching. The sound was gone. Lilith had made her entrance. She stood staring intently out at the clearing she'd made, her dark eyes fixed and unblinking. Suzie and I silently stepped further back into the dark of the forest, concealing ourselves in the deepest shadows. Just to see Lilith was to be scared of her. Of the power that burned in her, like all the stars in all the galaxies. She might have been created to be Adam's wife, but she'd come a long way since then.
    She hadn't simply appeared. It was as though Lilith had stamped or imprinted herself directly onto reality, by sheer force of will. She was there now because she chose to be, and somehow she seemed realer than anything else in the material world. She looked ... pretty much as I remembered her, from the last time I'd seen her. In Strangefellows bar, at the end of my last case. Just before everything went to hell.
    She was too tall and almost supernaturally slender, the lines of her bare body so smooth they looked like they'd been streamlined, for greater efficiency. Her hair and her eyes and her lips were jet-black, and together with her pale, colourless skin, she looked very much like a black and white photograph. Her face was sharp and pointed, with a prominent bone structure and a hawk nose. Her dark mouth was thin-lipped and far too wide, and her eyes were full of a dark fire that could burn through anything. The expressions that came and went on her face were in no way human. She looked ... wild, elemental, unfinished. She wore no clothes. She had no navel.
    I remembered the man called Madman, who Saw the world and everything in it more clearly than most, saying that the Lilith we saw and experienced was only a limited projection into our reality of something much greater and more complex. We only saw what we could stand to see. He also said that the human Lilith was really just a glorified glove puppet that she manipulated from afar.
    Lilith. Mother. Monster.
    I said as much to Suzie, and she nodded. "It doesn't matter. If she's real, I can kill her."
    We both kept our voices low, but I don't think even a thunderclap could have interrupted Lilith's concentration. Whatever she saw in the clearing wasn't there yet. She spoke a Word aloud, and it hit the air like a hammer. The sound of it filled the world, its echoes reaching out to touch everything. It was a word from no language I knew or could ever hope to understand, even with the assistance of Old Father Time's magic; it was an old word out of an old language, perhaps the basic language from which all others evolved. I could understand enough of its meaning to be glad I didn't understand any more.
    Summoned by that terrible Word, the world opened up to birth monsters. Awful creatures came stomping and hopping and slithering out of the trees behind Lilith. They towered over