01. Labyrinth of Dreams (16 page)

I tried to call to Brandy, but she seemed unable to hear me, and I saw her own mouth form words but bring no sound. In fact, there was no sound at all anymore, not even the sound of the big motors driving this, whatever it was.

There was no choice. Stay still, and you stood in a box, so you moved through them, panel after panel, side after side, trying to move out of the thing. I mean, the warehouse was big, but it didn't seem all
this
big.

Suddenly, we stepped into one and stopped, for beyond the panel to our left there was a solitary metal desk at which sat a man. He was wearing some sort of gray uniform, but he looked quite ordinary; an older man with a walrus moustache and, of all things, a monocle. The desk itself had some sort of device built into it that looked to me like some kind of sound-mixing console, with hundreds of little dials and levers. He looked up from the panel, stared at us for a moment, then moved a control. We started toward him, but he took the monocle from his eye and said,
"Frabishsnap!"
and threw a long lever. His voice sounded quite odd and amplified badly, like over a poor loudspeaker system.

Suddenly the whole cubic structure shifted, and now, even though we were stopped, the panels came at us faster and faster. Every once in a while one would blink on, for just a moment, then blink out before we could go to it.

A parched desert landscape with nothing alive under a blanket of eternal clouds. . . .

A jungle scene, thick and lush, with the remnants of some tropical monsoon washing down from the growth that blocked all views....

A reddish-brown landscape, with tremendously high grass of some pink color stretching off into the hills as far as the eye could see under a blue but unnaturally light sky. . . .

There weren't too many of these, although I had the distinct impression that I was actually seeing far more than the few sunlit scenes. It was quite possible that most of what I was seeing was, in fact, the inside of dark buildings at night.

There was a sudden, disorienting shift in balance and point of view, and we both got dizzy and fell ... onto wet grass. Sound hit me like a full orchestra, although it was only the basic sounds we all live with and the rustling of wind in the trees.

"Brandy?" I whispered. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah. I
think
so. You?"

"I'm suddenly feeling it where I tripped on that last step. I have a hunch I'm gonna be bruised for a while, but I feel okay otherwise." I sat up and looked around. "Where in heaven's name
are
we, though? And how did we get here?"

"I—I don't know. Jesus, Sam! Are we on another planet or something? What the
hell
was that thing?"

I shook my head and looked around, then up. There, in the sky, was a very familiar-looking quarter-moon, the same moon you could see back east. "If it's another planet, it's one just like the one we left," I told her. "That's the moon, all right."

She looked. "Yeah. It is, isn't it? But—where's the warehouse? Where are all the buildings, Sam?"

That
was a very good question. I sat there a moment nursing my wounds, and tried to think. "Hypnosis, maybe. Some kind of hypnotic machine. All that spinning and whirling in the dark. Who knows where they took us? As a matter of fact, they probably never knew we were there. We just kept walking in a trance or something, and now we're lost in those damned hills. I bet that's it." It made me feel a little better.

"I dunno, Sam. That funny dude with the eyepiece—did you see him, too?"

"Yeah, and heard him, for all the good it did. Looked like something out of comic opera, Gilbert and Sullivan or something. If you saw him, too, the odds are he was real, if nothing else was. That's bad. It means somebody knows we were there."

"Sam—maybe it wasn't hypnosis. Maybe—this is crazy, but I can't help thinkin' of that train yard and them two dudes up in the tower switchin' cars from one track to another. Suppose that thing was some kind of—railroad, I don't know, whatever people from outer space or somethin' might use. We kept goin' on a track, or something, and then we came to a switch place, that little man bein,' in the same job as the train men. He sees us, knows we ain't supposed to be there, and so he kinda, well,
switches
us. Switches us onto a siding or something like that. Just like they do with the trains."

I thought about it, and didn't like the thought at all. "If they'd dumped us in a desert or under that pink sky or if we had two moons or something, maybe I could buy it," I told her, "but this is Earth. The odds of there being two moons just like that is pretty slim. No, I can't buy it."

She sighed. "Yeah, but if this is still the Oregon woods, then it's hotter and wetter than I remember it bein' not too long ago. You can cut this air with a knife. Sweet Jesus, Sam! What did we get ourselves into?"

She was right about the heat and humidity, but it was too subjective a call for me to admit anything right off. "We got into something we shouldn't have, babe. We shoulda cut and run when Little Jimmy gave us the ax, that's for sure."

She reached into her pocket and took out a crumpled pack of Kools and a small lighter.

"You better give 'em up again, babe. Might be a while 'til you see another pack," I warned her.

"Shit on that. Never in all my born days did I need a smoke more than now. Just too bad it's got to be
tobacco."
She lit it and sat back for a moment. "God, that crud we lay in itches!"

That it did. I looked around the horizon, but all I could see were trees in all directions, although we were sitting in a clearing of sorts. I had been around enough to know that when it's pretty dark, even a small town's lights show up as a glow on the horizon; but there were no lights to be seen at all except the stars and the quarter-moon.

Then, off in the distance, I saw a flash; then it was gone. I had hopes for just a moment, but then the sound of distant thunder came to us, and the horizon in that direction seemed to blacken very quickly.

"Storm coming," I noted. "Maybe our way. Just what we need."

"The hell with it. If it comes here and rains buckets, I'm gonna strip out of these clothes and let it give me a shower, and maybe the clothes, too.
Anything
to get this crap off." She took off her boots and stuffed the remaining cigarettes and the lighter deep in the toe, then set that boot on its side, away from the storm. That was one of the reasons I loved her. She was always thinking and always practical, even in the strangest situations.

The clouds rolled in like tar spread across the sky, blacking out the moon and stars. The wind picked up tremendously, and it wasn't too long until I felt the first drops. Brandy was already stripping, I could see from the lightning's illumination, and I finally decided that she had the right idea. If anybody came up and caught us now, I'd just as soon be nude and washed than covered with foul-smelling grime.

I didn't like thunderstorms much—lightning always scared me, and I was always sure I was going to get hit no matter where I was—but the nearest shelter was the tall trees, and I knew damned well you didn't go next to trees in a thunderstorm.

The next ten minutes or so was the longest ten minutes of my life. It was one
hell
of a storm; the rain came down like I'd never seen it before, and all around there was a thunder-and-lightning show that was both scary and awesome. I never knew that much water could fall over such an area; it was as high-volume as if you were under a fire hose turned on full. It was more like being in a swimming pool than a shower or rainstorm, but it sure as hell got rid of that black, smelly powder.

It tapered off as quickly as it had come, and off in the direction from which we'd first seen it, the stars actually began appearing once more, while the area behind us was getting the treatment. That sucker was some storm.

I had mostly stood, frozen with fear, through the thing, and I found myself damned near unable to move now. The grass was high, thick, and very wet, and although the soft wind was drying me out, it wasn't doing anything for the surroundings. I could hear running water everywhere, and to take a step was to
squish.
At least Brandy had guessed right about taking off our clothes; on us or off us, they'd have been just as soaked, only now we were reasonably clean underneath.

The clothes, however, were definitely not wearable for some time. We picked them up and tried to wring them out, but no matter how much you twisted, there seemed to be more and more water, and that was just the shirts. Twisting out fairly new jeans wasn't easy, either. I always thought they were sort of water-repellent, but they just seemed to absorb more than the shirts.

Brandy had prepared for the washing as much as possible, while I hadn't thought much about it, so like a fool I'd left my boots straight up to the sky. One had fallen down, but toward the storm, and the other was filled to the brim with water.

"Well, what do we do now?" I mused aloud, not really talking to Brandy.

"I think we head for the trees and find someplace to hang this all up to dry," she replied. "Then we settle down and see if we can get any sleep or what out here in the wilds. Don't seem no use to try and find out where we are 'til mornin'. Daylight comes, maybe we can find a road or something."

There seemed like nothing else we could do. We didn't know one direction from the other and wouldn't until the sun came up, but with the clearing, we figured the clothes would get some kind of breeze and
some
sun no matter where we hung them, so long as they were exposed. All we could do, of course, was find some low bushes and drape them across the tops. Neither of us had remembered to pack clothespins.

There wasn't anyplace really dry to settle down, but we found a spot behind a big tree that was grassy and had escaped the full force of the rain. Somehow, though, with the dripping-down, I didn't think we'd get much sleep that night. We lay close together, and put our arms around each other.

"Well," I sighed, "back a couple of weeks ago I figured we were about as low as we could go, and now here we are, stark naked in the woods in which live who knows what, with nothing but some drying clothes, a partial pack of cigarettes, and a pocket lighter, stuck in the middle of nowhere. We got nothing, not even answers to any of this."

She sighed and kissed me. "I know. Maybe we're jumping bail to boot, too. No matter what, I keep draggin' us down more and more. Now it's Adam and Eve and no fruit trees. At least I got no trouble with bugs. Nothin' that lives 'round here can be as scary as the cockroaches of Camden. It's like a punishment, somehow. Everything I ever did, I screwed up. School, business, Daddy's dreams, everything, including you."

"I was wrong," I told her. "I said we got nothing and I was wrong. I'm like the guy on the news whose house burns down, and he's standing there, crying about how he's lost everything, with his wife and kids all standing around him safe and sound. I love you, Brandy. I love you more than anything else in the world. You didn't do anything to me. I came willingly, all the way, 'cause I fell in love with the cutest, sexiest, craziest girl in the world. All we did here, including the bad mistakes, we did together. You're a part of me, the most important part. How could you screw me up if I wasn't just as crazy as you?"

She grabbed me and kissed me, hard and passionate. "I love you, Sam Horowitz," she whispered sexily. "I love you a thousand times more now than when I married you."

It was kind of kinky doing it there in the wet grass, out in the open and all, but, damn it, if you couldn't eat and you couldn't sleep and the only thing that really meant anything to you was there in the same mood, it sure beat thinking.

The underwear and the cigarettes and lighter were okay, but the rest was a real wreck. That sun was
hot,
as hot as I had ever felt it, and I'd been in the Philippines and Hawaii in midsummer. That sun had done a real job on some of the clothes.

"I never knew jeans could shrink," I said glumly. They didn't look all that different, but there was a good two- or three-inch rise in the leg bottoms, and as for closing the top flap and zipping them up, forget it. I didn't regret the flannel shirt that much, not in this heat, although at least I could get it on—though not buttoned— but the pants were a pain.

Brandy's hadn't fared much better. There was enough give in the briefs and even in the bra to make them serviceable, like my jockey shorts, but as for the jeans and dyed tee shirt, forget it. Seemed that no matter what, we were stuck in our undies, and as for the boots, well, mine felt as wet as last night, although Brandy's were okay, only mildly damp, but still had some of that black gunk in them because they hadn't been rinsed out.

"Well, it's not a total loss," I commented sourly. "At least when we find some civilization we'll have our underwear."

Brandy shrugged. "Well, it's something. Our big problem isn't clothes, it's food. Wonder what grows in Oregon?"

"Apples, I think, and maybe potatoes, or is that Idaho? From the looks of things here, I'd say we'd better move or learn to eat grass."

The grass, in fact,
was
tall, going up to almost waist height in the lower areas. I knew it'd seemed bad last night, but not this bad. We picked up our soggy boots and walked up the rise to the nearly flat center of the big meadow, which was about where we'd come out, or woke up, or whatever it was we'd done, and Brandy looked around and frowned.

"What's the matter?" I asked her.

"This place. You got to use a little imagination, but it sure does look like the same area that plant was built in." She checked the sun. "If that's east, or sorta east, then let's go south a bit and see what we find."

"If there's a train yard down there, I'll believe anything," I responded.

It really was a vast area of grass, maybe a hundred or more acres,' and it
did
kind of look like the lay of the land where the plant had been—if, as she'd said, you used some imagination. It was kind of like what the place would have been if the plant had never been built and this area never developed. There was even a steep downslope, but it led to the start of the trees at the bottom, not any rail yards. It was, however, a flat area, more or less, built up from the looks of it by occasional stream floods.