Like a man who escaped drowning, Judd drew in a sudden and huge breath. He sat up coughing and breathed as if it were the first time. He glanced around--the crimson velvets of the room engulfed him like a tide. A dream, it was just a dream! he thought. I'm still in the Red Room--a nightmare, just a nightmare. Judd still felt his head aching dreadfully, and a strange sensation down his throat. Sweat bathed his clothes. Everything had been so vivid, so real..He rose from his bare pallet.

His first thought ran to the green altar--it was empty. Bahamut had disappeared. Judd's mind reeled. Someone must have stolen in. Perhaps the High Priest had taken his Work? He stood up with difficulty and staggered towards the west wing of the house, where his grandfather lived. He walked through the mammoth library, where the forbidden books laid buried inside other books. He paused a while in the grand living room, under its towering stained glass windows. Then he ascended the staircase and knocked at the High Priest's room. From the inside, it came a peculiar suffused sound, like the ticking of nails on glass. Judd waited a moment; nobody came to open. He turned the door handle and went inside.

Judd felt his eyes twitch, refusing to see: Drops of moisture poured out of the ceiling and flowed down in a rhythmic and slow rain in front of him. A pale haze hovered in the room, hardly lit by the few oil lamps resting on the old furniture. Everything is identical to the dream, he thought. The room, the rain, the lamps... Yet there's something. The bed!

The bed was unmade.

Judd searched around for something that could break the absurd sensation of reminiscence that overwhelmed him, then he noticed the thin layer of water flowing under the door-sill. That was the door, in the dream, through which his grandparents had left. Beyond the threshold there was the meadow under the white church, with its cemetery falling sheer to the sea. Judd headed for the door and opened it. In front of him, the water threw itself into the void. There was neither the meadow, nor the church, but only the void, a strange void without dimension. The water did not flow towards the bottom, but it ran horizontally. It was as if space and gravity had been distorted. Vertical and horizontal were on the same plane. Leaning against the door, Judd did not seem to experience the distorted gravity. He stood there, staring with wide-opened eyes, his mind sinking deeper and deeper into madness. He glanced back over his shoulder--everything was in order, firmly stuck on the ground. Judd turned and suddenly felt sick--his stomach lurched as if he were suspended on an abyss beneath. His feet lost contact with the floor. For a second he felt overturned, and then his whole body fell through the door. He clutched frantically at the doorpost, but a tremendous force dragged him. Judd tried to pull himself up--he could not. He looked desperately up at the quiet room, then his fingers slipped on the wood, and he fell into the yawning darkness.

Judd fell through the darkness for an endless time. He kept falling for such a long time the he wasn't sure anymore whether he was falling or floating. He stretched his arm and touched a driblet, caught it, let it quiver on his finger: its bare surface tension kept it glued to his skin. Whether they traveled at the same speed or he had reached the dimensionless center of Hell. If instead he was traveling at such a speed, he thought. With a deafening splash, Judd smashed into water. His body nearly broke in the impact. Then, with a great effort, he emerged and pulled himself up on a solid surface.

An utter bleakness enclosed him like a dark secret. Judd stood up and walked away. Slowly he started perceiving shades on darker shades and some dim phosphorescence breathing around him. His feet slapped water on what sounded like a stony ground--a faint echo resounded far away.

Little by little, Judd lost completely any sense of direction. He did not know where he was, where he came from, where he was going. However, he perceived something better then he felt his own breath: the farther he had walked, the deeper he had wormed himself into the bowels of a titanic space spread out around him. Suddenly he stopped right in his tracks. His breath grew faster. Just a few steps before him, a shade had moved through the darker shades. He stood still, perfectly still.

Minutes ticked away without uttering a sound.

Then a gagging, bloodcurdling sound came out of thin air, then steps that carried a heavy, rotten load, and then a bitter presence, more viscid than the stench of death. Judd wheeled round as a voice started to speak.

"At the end of the IX century all the copies of the Hundred and One Night that contained Rhbeen-Al-Tariq's lunatic tale were burnt, and the poet's mouth was sealed forever with desert thorns, so that he wouldn't tell that tale anymore. Yet he had written the truth, as he told that the prophet Isa, or Jesus, was granted the grace to see Bahamut, and, after seeing It, he fell to the ground and it took him three days to regain consciousness."

Judd crouched, shutting his mouth with hands and lips, trying to deaden his panting, but it was too loud, too loud. He could hear it thundering in his ears. He got a glimpse of another dark shade moving inside the darkness. Then he heard the click of a trigger. A flare burst out from nowhere--Judd blinked and glimpsed a pistol in his grandfather's hand--then the flare darted swiftly upwards.

The air lit up, and flooded the walls of an immeasurable, endless space.

Judd stood up and the blood in his veins ceased to flow for he realized what he was looking at: everywhere around him, there were not rocks, but immense walls of red and moist flesh. Judd stared at the ephemeral images as they passed away in the descending trajectory of the flare. The last short and distant light spasm was just fading away, when something stirred. Like an abscess, a monstrous shape hatched out of a remote wall. It spread its membranous wings, In its misshapen limbs, a gleam flickered as if the creature held an illuminant object. Then the darkness fell again.

Judd stood still before his grandfather, before darkness, just a few steps from the gate that led to madness. In the distance, limp and rhythmic wing-strokes started to beat the air, drawing nearer. Judd did not dare to move. A little deaf light flew through the air. The wind strokes approached and then the insane glimmer was suddenly within a stone's throw in front of Judd.

Out of darkness loomed the timeworn hands of the High Priest; they stretched and caught the radiant object held by a pair of prehensile organs ominously hanging in mid air. The High Priest laid the strange glowworm lantern on the ground, and the darkness swallowed up the last hint of the flying monstrosity above him. The only thing that remained of it was the harsh jarring of its membranous wings. No, there was something else left. Through the pitch-black Judd perceived the grasp of two bestial eyes ravenously aimed at him. They hungered after him.

The High Priest smirked at Judd and with a wave of his hand dismissed the flying fiend like a servant. The monstrous jarring went slowly away, leaving a silence full of aberrant thoughts behind.

Judd's forefather approached and showed the precious object he held with reverence. "The mouth of the prophet Rhbeen-Al-Tariq was sealed forever with desert thorns," he said, "so that he wouldn't tell that tale any more. Just imagine what a portentous creature he saw! What an uncreated Might! Now watch my hands, grandson. Look at Bahamut, which is both the key and the lock. Look at the dream creature that is reality!"

Now Judd saw it--that was his aquarium. A movement inside the aquarium drew Judd's eyes--the fish head of the god turned towards him, translucent and colorless. It's impossible, cried Judd's mind, that's an inanimate sculpture, not a living creature! "Stay away," he yelled.

"You," said the High Priest, "you are the favorite and the sacrifice, Judd. You have brought Bahamut to us, the upturned key. Bahamut, which now wakes up, and dreaming the Gate of Shadow, will lead here the God-Abyss."

"What monstrous blasphemy dare you utter! Bahamut is the only real God, it is you that taught me that!"

"You are the favorite and the sacrifice," repeated the High Priest, then he unlocked the top of the aquarium and dropped Bahamut into the water.

The monstrous offspring stirred itself from immobility. Judd knew he had not infused that blind and alien life into it. That wasn't his Work anymore. The High Priest had restored Bahamut to life. Then he understood his grandfather's words and felt a blind terror growing inside him. He did not want to be the sacrifice. His grandfather had deceived him,.

The creature steered the long body, swimming between Judd's legs. "No, don't!" shouted Judd and run away, but where there was a floor before, he found nothing. He ran three steps and plunged into water, dark and cold water that flowed into his lungs. He frantically grasped something jutting out. His hand seized a gill, the gill of a monstrous hybrid, a thing that lurked, as if set among the rocks. No, it was not rock that supported it, but others of its breed, other hybrids, and some more. Suddenly something catched Judd and hurled him to the surface. He spewed up all the water he had just swallowed. He barely started breathing again and glanced around. There must be a way out, he thought, but recoiled immediately in terror as hundreds of eyes gazed at him from the water surface.

"Yes, grandson, we stand on an abyss of water, supported only by my brothers. And now thank me Judd: the time has come for you to see the Great God that dwells in unfathomable deeps. Then, when your blood is ripe, you'll come back to me in eternal glory!" The hoary man darted forward with inhuman swiftness. He stabbed his fingers into Judd's throat and pulled back violently, ripping through his flesh.

Judd lifted his hands, but it was too late. He felt his mouth filling with blood--no, it was water. Oblivion flooded his body like a tide that drowned him into silence.