Magic Time: Angelfire by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Marc Zicree

is the $64,000 question, isn’t it? I suppose I could blame it on our brush with the Shadows, but that would be cheap and predictable. I feel something dark and viscous and suffocating moving around in the long, dark, convoluted corridors of my brain. I find I want it to stay there, where it’s hidden itself.
    “Insomnia,” I say. “Lack of appetite. Jitters. A return to journal-keeping. Scary thoughts.”
    “What kind of scary thoughts?” asks Cal.
    “Did I say ‘thoughts’? I meant ‘moments.’ Scary moments. Vertigo. That sort of thing. Nothing earth-shaking.” Just the usual sense of being dangled over the Grand Canyon by a hair. I tuck both hands under my arms.
    “We all have vertigo in these times, Goldie,” Doc tells me. “I would like to reserve judgment about giving you carbamazepine—if indeed we have any.”
    “Um, there’s some lithium and some valproate,” I say. “I don’t respond well to lithium. I’ve never had valproate. I didn’t find any carbamazepine.”
    “Under the circumstances, Goldie, I think you will understand if I do not leap to medicate you. We live in a time of unknowns and we have all been subject to unnatural stresses. Are you willing to wait? To see what happens?”
    To see if I go flat freakin’ crazy? Sure, why not? Panic flickers momentarily in my gut. But, no. He’s right. Based on what I’ve told him, any other course of action would be premature. And I am altogether unsure I want to tell more, so I leave the other half of the truth where it lies.
    Doc gives me some valerian root tea—surely the most foul-tasting swamp water in creation—and sends me back to bed. He promises it will relax me. I actually drink the tea. It helps. But it doesn’t keep my masochistic mind from poking at itself.
    I lie in the dark, wondering if I should have told whole truths and examining the experience—nightmare or hallucination or vision—that sent me to the pharmacy. I am in a dark tower—like a castle keep—full of dead-end corridors, subterranean passages, and moldering stone. This is blurry, indistinct. I know that outside is light and freshness and freedom, and inside is cold, dead murk.
    Below, beneath the foundations of this ruin, is a cesspool of something black and oozing and malevolent. It boils there in relative silence, incongruously making a sound as benign as falling rain. But as I explore this dark place, looking for a way out, I feel it wake and begin to rise. With a dreamer’s omniscience, I know it is coming up to meet me, climbing stairways, drowning corridors, filling rooms.
    I climb, of course. In horror films, they always climb, while the viewer is thinking, God, what a schlemazel ! because the schlemazel always climbs his way into a dead-end corridor.
    I’m no different. I climb a stairway that I somehow know leads to a room with only one way out—straight down.
    At intervals, I turn back and catch a glimpse of what has oozed up out of the bowels of the Tower. It’s black and oily and gleams like liquid obsidian. And in the bulging tongue of stuff that licks up the stairwell after me, I see myriad almost-faces as if they were a swarm of insects in amber.
    But it’s what I hear that really makes my skin crawl. There is a voice for every face, a whisper, a growl, a cry, a shout. It’s enough to make me rethink my certainty about multiple personality disorder. (Maybe Mother’s diagnoses weren’t sheer crap, after all, and I owe her an apology.) It also terrifies me, because in the same way that I can almost see the faces, I can almost hear the voices, almost understand what they’re saying. And the closer I strain toward understanding, the more thoroughly, soul-chillingly scared I get, because I know that this thing wants me to understand, and that if I understand, it will engulf me, and if it does this, I will go ape shit, stark-raving mad.
    Or I’ll drown, which is pretty much the same thing.
    The only out I see is off the top of the Tower