Free The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) by Cesar Torres Page B

blood. I looked mutilated and severed. I was a body violated and putrid.
    But José María’s reflection looked worse, as his hair fell away in the image and his full lips receded. His skin had gone dark and black, charred like barbecue. His hands dripped with blood, and his neck split open in the image. His skin had holes in it, and beneath these holes, there was nothing but raw flesh.
    I screamed as the reflection grew more solid and we ran toward them.
    I was not imagining this moment. José María shrieked next to me. He could see this disgusting reflection, too.
    "Jesus Christ!" he shouted.
    We were running too fast when we had started down the hall, and under normal circumstances, José María and I would have slowed down our gallop in order to pause, and then exited through the doors with caution. But that had not been the case. The dark reflection in front of us had mesmerized us, entranced us, and we had run toward it with magnetic speed, and now, just three feet away from the glass, we were going to crash right into the doors, possibly shattering the glass and cutting ourselves to ribbons, truly becoming the bloody images we saw in its reflection.
    I let out a sound that was part cry, part bellow, but all fear.
    José María had not let go of my hand, and his grip got tighter as he also braced himself for impact.
    When we struck the glass, the first sensation I felt was that of sound rippling through my whole body, making my bones and organs vibrate and my head ring with tones like bells. The surface of the glass had gone soft, like gelatin, and we struck the double doors without a crash. Instead, we moved through the surface and into the darkness of the reflection inside. A symphony of sound enveloped us, and I thought that this was what it might feel like to be a molecule of air inside a violin. In the microseconds where we crossed through the barrier, sound surged so deeply inside my body that I felt my organs melting away, and the tension that had been in my body fade away into a velvety softness.
    We fell forward for what fell like hours, and my stomach fluttered as if I had just leapt from the Hancock tower without a parachute. When we landed, we struck hard, dry earth, and small pebbles scraped my cheek.
    I was facedown now, and the only thing that felt solid was my brother's hand intertwined in mine.
    I looked up. We were in the dark that I had glimpsed in the other side. I couldn't make out anything, because night had taken over here. This was darkness. This was the kind of dark that had terrorized me as a child. This was the same darkness where the boogeyman lived, where Freddy Krueger slashed his film victims, and where my heart and my brain had always told me not to enter.
    The symphonic sound I had heard was coming from a place above me, and in the dark, I got the sense that I was standing on some sort of flat surface, like a desert. Wind whipped around me, and I felt very, very cold. In the dark before me, I finally made out a single object as my night vision kicked in. I still couldn't see José María, or the ground, or anything except for the silhouette of the object in front of us. But I felt his hand, and I squeezed.
    The object before us was pyramidal in shape, and possibly the size of a skyscraper. It was a triangle of ink set against a dark blue-black sky, and the symphonic sound was coming from its peak.
    From the top, something was peering at my brother and me.
    The thing itself emitted no light, and so there was nothing to see. But I knew that it occupied the space at the top of that triangular shape, and it was staring down at us.
    When I looked at my brother's hand, all I could see was darkness, but the warmth of his skin was real.
    José María , I tried to say.
    But I had no words. Each time I opened my mouth to speak, no sound came out.
    I tried screaming, and all I could hear was the blood beating inside my eardrums and a soft roaring sound, the breathing inside my lungs.
    My heart