Giles couldn’t seem to collect his wits.
He was in his own story. He sat on Cloud Rock, facing his own character, Doree.
That had happened to him in dreams a few times, where he had found himself having conversations and once even being rescued by a character from a story. But here she was, alive and solid and speaking to him.
And she was Tiffany. There couldn’t be any doubt. She talked differently and she was still a kid, but this was the being who would grow into Tiffany. Theophania.
For a while he hoped this was Tiffany, Tiffany the capable demon, injecting herself into his story again to save him. But there was no trace of recognition in the eyes of the black-haired girl facing him saucily.
And who was he? Where in the story was he?
Just after the part where the stranger ate the green lemon fruit, he supposed. He remembered that to the stranger the delicious thing had tasted like a bland guava.
So, was he “Robby Baker?” He tried to look into his “own” memories and fish out who he was supposed to be. The impressions were confused but he got glimpses of self-importance and self-doubt and unimportant janitorial work suddenly overlaid with confusing government spy work. So he was that janitor-turned-time-traveler who had appeared to Doree at first. But that meant –
A melodic and very fruity voice called from below, “Doree, who is that lovely young man with you? I thought you were up there alone?”
Doree looked sad and Giles tensed. He knew what was coming next.
“Oh, look a there!” Doree shrieked. “You can see the ground, like happens sometimes!”
Terrified, Giles looked down, knowing the Earth would be rushing towards them in the sky overhead. He focused on the redness of the rock, so like the rock dome where Mrs. Benz had lost her husband.
But Doree insisted, “Not the rock, the ground. Follow my fingers, see?”
He had to look up at the approaching doom.
But the sight of the sky filled with stone and rushing towards him like a falling bomb dropped him on his behind, even though he’d known what he was going to see. No matter how intensely you lived it as you told the story, nothing could prepare you to experience something like that.
Doree chittered on like an excited squirrel.
There were moments left before the contact between Cloud Rock and Earth. Giles knew he had to look up. He would at last see something which he had not been able to see when he told either part of the story. From the point of view of Robby on Earth, he’d seen something from the corner of his eye but Tiffany, inhabiting the old woman, had kissed him to prevent him from looking at it. From the point of view of Doree on Cloud Rock, he’d been hysterical (and not realizing it).
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Cringing, nearly passing out, Giles looked up.
And holy Moses if he didn’t see God.
When Tiffany/Mrs. Benz had kissed him, he’d seemed to see the blue sky ripping open. Now, he looked down from above and saw some powerful entity, a man but on an inhuman scale, carefully ripping open the sky. The man had a malignant grin overlaid with scientific scholarly detachment. I’m not really causing any damage, I’m just performing a humble experiment and observing the results.
And, as though the Earth were covered in blue sky like the blue rind of some melons, the man was using some vague, shining knife to slit that rind, to rip right down to the naked, vulnerable surface.
Everywhere the man ripped, Chaos flowed in like injected Styrofoam. This was the moment from two years ago when the Chaos rushed in and replaced the sky.
The solid ground swelled and filled the sky. Giles clung desperately to the low bushes, afraid they would rip out in his hands. The man turned his face slowly toward Giles like one of The Gentlemen in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode which had given Giles nightmares.
The monstrous face lit with mad delight and the God figure reached out a clutching hand…
He disappeared. Maybe Cloud Rock passed right through him. But not before Giles saw that he was Killington, unmistakably Killington.
Cloud Rock rushed on in, its red rock matching the red rock filling the sky. In exquisitely detailed slow motion, Giles saw landmarks in that sky: the huge mass of red rock which was the rust-colored mountain where evil might be starting, the little wisp of smoke from Mrs. Benz’s chimney, the little ant figures of Robby and the old woman. They stood on smooth stone right near what was recognizable at this angle as a gash in the mountainside where something had been ripped away.
At the last instant Giles couldn’t bear to watch. They’d be smashed to atoms! He closed his eyes tight, even though he knew it wouldn’t happen.
The moment when they hit came and went and there was no crash, not even a quiver.
He felt suddenly braver, not like he was an arrogant clerk or janitor about to pass out at his first real danger.
He opened his eyes. The flat Earth above wheeled and wobbled away like the hubcap “flying saucers” in Plan Nine from Outer Space. It quickly disappeared in electric snowy Chaos. Doree beside him chattered something about having peed and then went rigid as a stick and fainted like a cartoon character.
The others on Cloud Rock shouted in panic and called conflicting advice to each other and at any second someone would come up to the top of the little hill to check on Doree. But for the moment, he rose slowly to his feet alone.
He had a small island of time to make some important decision.
In dream quiet, Doree lay passed out in a pool of liquid. The liquid was not blood. It was golden but it was not pee either.
A stranger lay in that puddle, clutching the ground. The stranger, a nebbish of a clerk or janitor, rolled shakily over and blinked up at him.
Or was Giles lying on his back blinking up at an intruder who had just landed after a death-defying double somersault?
This was the moment which followed the ending of part two of his story. Robby, flung into the sky at the instant when God ripped the sky open and Cloud Rock sped through, had risen through Earth’s air, passed the boundary into Cloud Rock, flipped over and, thinking he was still high in the air and upside-down, smacked onto its solid surface. He had been afraid to look around, even when the voice called out to him.
Right on cue, a voice called out to him.
He, Giles, was at the intersection of the two stories. If he was the standing man full of confused cheer and confidence, then he was Robby Baker and the story would go one way. If he was the man lying on the ground then he was Ed the janitor with the back brace who had been pulled into the time travel experiment and the story would go another way.
And the gold liquid on the ground beside the unconscious Doree: was it gold energy cast from her hands?
No. It was the golden juice of the fruit “Ed” had just eaten, vomited back in the horror of nearly being squished by a vast stone sky. Giles/Robby stooped to look at it more closely.
Or Giles/Ed rolled over to shield it from the looming stranger.
Everything depended on who reached it first.