Read And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) for Free Online Page A

a stream of gibberish that sounded very much like the language the two young people had spoken. It was not her voice, nor Mogart's, but her voice trying to be his. The effect was ghastly, like a voice from the dead, but it didn't seem to bother the boy at all. Instead, he nodded and responded to the girl. For over three minutes Mogart, through the girl, and the boy, who sat outside the pen-tagram, engaged in a dialogue Jill could not follow.
    Finally it ended, and Mogart stepped outside the girl's body and turned.
    "Go up to the girl and touch her," he ordered softly.
    Jill suddenly became hesitant. "I'm not sure I like-" she started, but found herself doing as ordered, anyway.
    "Remember-only the jewel can return you to me," she heard Mogart's voice warn her. "Fail, and you are here as long as you live."
    With that she felt an enormous shock, as if sud-denly colliding with a wall at high speed, her head seemed to explode in pain, and she sank into uncon-sciousness.
    Inside the room the boy watched as the fire and wind diminished; there was a sharp but not loud cracking sound, and the cubes suddenly and violently shot out in all directions across the room, banging against the adobe walls. He had to raise his hands to fend off one, and it stung.
    On the table the body of the girl collapsed into an unmoving heap.
    2
    They were strange dreams, and yet somehow fa-miliar. She had dreamed a part of these dreams before, long ago, in the twilight of childhood and on the threshold of adolescence. True, some of the settings were odd, even bizarre, yet others were not, and there were human universals involved.
    Some of the dreams were pleasant, some nightmar-ish; many were erotic in one way or another.
    She tossed and turned through them, barely aware that they were dreams.
    Then one began to dominate: a world where bison roamed and the people looked like American Indians and a funny little devil named Mogart, who told her to go steal some jewels to help prevent the end of her world.
    "You awake?" came a voice, that of a young boy whose prepubescent soprano was slightly tinged with the promise of forthcoming manhood.
    Jill McCulloch awoke and opened her eyes. Her body ached; she felt as if she'd been sleeping for hours on a bed of concrete.
    This is the room, that straw-filled adobe room, she thought wonderingly. And over there, reclining on a woven mat and munching something, was a boy-no, the boy.
    This isn't a dream, she realized with growing horror. This is real!
    She sat up unsteadily and shook her head to clear the remaining cobwebs. She was still on the table! No wonder 1 feel so black-and-blue, she thought. She looked down at herself as if to confirm the impossible that she already knew, somehow, would be there.
    Small, bony limbs with almost no body development, covered by a skin of deep reddish brown like the boy's. She was inside the girl's body! She was the girl!
    "How-how long have I been out?" she managed, feeling awkward and ill at ease.
    The boy shrugged. "Hour maybe, maybe two. I wasn't sure if the whole thing had come off or not."
    He was talking very differently than she'd expected. Then she realized he was talking in his own language, as was she. It came easy, as if native to her, and it sounded natural, Only traces, nouns mostly, of English remained in her mind-words like "airplane" and "electricity" and countless others that had no counterpart here.
    "You know I'm not-ah, not the girl," she stam-mered, trying to open an impossible conversation.
    He nodded. "Oh, sure. I knew that the moment you opened your mouth. Your manner's different, too."
    "You're not-ah-surprised?" she ventured, amazed at his matter-of-fact attitude.
    He shook his head. "Naw. This is-lemme see-about this many times this year alone." He_ held up three fingers, and she realized that he couldn't count. With a start she realized she couldn't, either.
    The ability was there, sort of, but she didn't seem to be able to get to it, pull it out, use