The shape was taking on solidity. Dazed, Bryan recalled the events in the park. Leeta's strange globe, he realized, had absorbed some vital essence from its victim—perhaps the soul—and this essence was now being released by the pool. Released, somehow, in a perfect replica of the fleshly covering that originally had housed it.
The man hung over the pool. His closed eyes fluttered, opened. Animation touched his face. Fear showed in it, a rising horror, a frantic desperation. He struggled.
And began dissolving.
The pool boiled and seethed as though in a mighty effort to hold its creation intact. It did not succeed. The shape thinned, shrunk, faded ... was gone.
There was a moment of stricken stillness. The pool had quieted. Its aura of supernal power had dimmed. An air of exhaustion lay over it now, an exhaustion in which even the surrounding flowers seemed to pale and droop.
Then a piping murmur rose like a sigh of mourning. "Failed ... again...."
And Leeta covered her face with her hands, sagging. Her bowed shoulders shook, with great sobs of mingled grief, disappointment and despair.
Bryan wanted to make some sign of sympathy, of consolation—but again the scene was growing blurred, fading. He fought to hold it together, fought as the pool had fought ... futilely. And then a hovering blackness rushed over him, and he seemed to whirl dizzily across an enormous gulf.
He awoke in bed, soaked with perspiration, breathing hard. He had a feeling of anger, dejection.
He swung his legs to the floor and glanced at his watch. He had been asleep for less than an hour, but at the moment he was too upset by his strangely realistic nightmare to return to bed.