Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (16 page)

"Right," the Wolluf said. "So if you imagine the planes that are simultaneous as being stacked on top of one another, like the floors in an apartment house—and it is sometimes possible to get a glimpse, or actually shift from one floor to another, as Elizabeth, or Audrey, has done—you can also imagine shifting to the planes that are ahead or behind us in time. You follow?"

"Sure," Molly said. "There are lots of complete worlds out there we know nothing about, and the inhabitants of which know nothing about us, some in the same time continuum, and some ahead of us or behind us in time."

"Usually," the Wolluf said.

"Usually," Molly said.

"I'm not done yet," the Wolluf said. "Now imagine that in addition to the different floors of the imaginary apartment house, there are cellars, crawlspaces, attics, storage rooms, garages, sheds, secret passages, and hidden staircases."

"Oh, boy!" Molly said.

"And they are full of people?" I asked.

"Some are, some aren't: some are full of other-than-people. Some are in the same time-space continuum as others, some are in different ones, and some are not all one thing or all another."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Well, you know that there are parts of Poughkeepsie that are not city, not suburb, not country, not industrial, not wasteland, and maybe not solid land and not water. You might have a little cottage, a place that makes truck tires, a drugstore, a field of corn, a pond, a woods, a swamp, and the police station, all within sight of one another."

"Yes. So?"

"So imagine there was an existential plane sort of between this one we are now on and the next one—sort of an unofficial mishmash of a plane, not one thing and not another, not now and not then. Can you imagine something like that?"

"Yes. Why do you want us to?"

"Because I want us to go there."

"Does it have a name? Also, why?"

"It is called Apokeepsing, and I want us to go there so Elizabeth can maybe meet herself. Anyway, something like that."

"Are you following this?" I asked Molly.

"After a fashion," she said. "Are you?"

"More or less," I said. "I'm not sure it matters. Maybe the Wolluf isn't expressing it clearly, or maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about."

"But you want to go to this demiplane, mishmash place."

"Oh, definitely," I said.

"So how do we get to this where-or-whatever-or-whenever-it-is?" I asked.

"Be here at dawn," the Wolluf said. "Bring the cloaks—you'll definitely need those. Give the old lady my regards, and tell her you don't know how long you'll be gone." Then he vanished.

We tried not to make any noise going to bed, but Chicken Nancy heard us. "Wolluf gone?" she called from her bedroom.

"Gone for now," we called back to her. "He'll be back at dawn. We're going somewhere with him and we don't know how long we'll be gone."

"Take the cloaks with you," Chicken Nancy
called. "And there are lunches for you and the Wolluf in paper bags on the sideboard. Have a nice time."

"Do you think she knows where we're going?" I asked Molly.

"I think she knows what the Wolluf eats for lunch," Molly said.

"Do you think she's really afraid to see him?"

"I don't know. Maybe they were boyfriend and girlfriend, or boy monster and girl witch, in 1850, and broke up on bad terms," Molly said. "Maybe they are secretly in cahoots and are cooperating to arrange our destiny. I do know that I have the feeling everybody around here knows more about what's going to happen to us than we do."

"I have the same feeling," I said. "It's as though we are characters in a story somebody else is writing."

When we stumbled outside at the crack of dawn, the Wolluf was waiting for us.

"Is that lunch?" the Wolluf asked. "What did she pack for us?"

"I think it's cold fishcake sandwiches," I said.

"My favorite! She makes the best fishcakes of anyone," the Wolluf said.

Molly and I looked at each other. Why would the Wolluf know a thing like that?

"Now let's get started," the Wolluf said. "Stand over here, side by side."

We stood on a little bare patch of ground. The Wolluf scurried around, bringing pebbles and twigs and carefully arranging them on the ground in some
complicated pattern. While he did this, he sang a song under his breath.

"
...to Honky-Tonky Town.
It's underneath the ground,
where all the fun is found.
There are singing waiters,
syncin' syncopaters,
and a jazz pianna played by Mr. Brown.

"All right, now start walking around each other, counterclockwise, and when I tell you, stamp your feet hard.

"
...he plays it all by ear—
the music that you hear
will make you stay a year.

"Now stamp your feet as you walk! Stamp! Stamp! Stamp!

"
He's even got the monkey
dancin' with the donkey
down in Honky-Tonky Town.
"

It is next to impossible to describe what it feels like to be swallowed up by the earth—in fact, it is not
next to impossible; it is impossible. It is even impossible to contemplate it while it is happening. The best I can do is say we were swallowed up by the earth. Swallowed up and spat out again. It was too unexpected to be scary, and happened too fast for us to know if it was uncomfortable—but I know it wasn't comfortable. All I can tell for sure is that one moment we were sort of circling each other counterclockwise and stamping our feet in the woods outside Chicken Nancy's house, and in another moment we were doing the same thing, only going clockwise, someplace else.

"You may stop now, girls," the Wolluf said. "We have arrived."

It was the Wolluf talking, but the cute puppy was nowhere to be seen. Molly was not seeing the uncomfortable-making brilliant darkness. The only person near us who was not us had to be the Wolluf—besides, the bulky man wearing clunky boots, baggy trousers, and a long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the neck was speaking in the Wolluf's voice. He had very pale skin, yellow eyes, pointy teeth, long hair, and whiskers all over his face—he was handsome in a scary way.

"You changed," I said.

"I do that—especially during a full moon. And so have you," the Wolluf said. "Have a look at yourself."

My hand, holding the bags of lunch, was covered with lovely soft orangey fur. When I pushed my sleeve
up, I saw that my arm was furry too, and stripey with alternating reddish and yellowish stripes. My cheeks felt fuzzy.

"How do I look?" I asked Molly.

"Much more pussycat-ish," Molly said. "It's a good look for you. How about me? Anything different?"

I looked Molly over. "You still look like you, only maybe a foot taller, and you sort of remind me of Chicken Nancy now—something about the look in your eyes."

"You'd best put your cloak on, Audrey-Elizabeth," the Wolluf said. "And you too, Molly—just so we all look like a group from the same period."

"Is this what you actually look like?" I asked the Wolluf.

"It is at present," the Wolluf said. "Same as it is with you. Now take a look around and tell me where you think we are."

"It's a lot like downtown Poughkeepsie," I said. "Is it Poughkeepsie?"

"I recognize some buildings," Molly said. "But they look a little different."

"It smells different too," I said. "I smell woodfires, and coal, and horses—and is that cough drops?"

"Also, some of the people are unlike the citizens of Poughkeepsie as we have come to know them," Molly
said. "For example, there are many of what seem to be lizards, walking upright and wearing old-fashioned clothing, and birdlike people. Also regular humans, or something close to it."

"So what gives?" I asked the Wolluf. "Where are we, and what is the nature of this place?"

"Well, as I was explaining to you, this is a sort of quasi-existential plane. It is squished in between the plane on which Poughkeepsie as you know it exists and some other plane of a more stable nature, and has attributes of both, plus qualities of its own. We are neither here nor there, and that goes for time as well as space. Feel free to ask questions."

"I have a question," I said. "That building with the golden statue of a chicken on top—unless I am mistaken, it is very much like the building I have visited many times as the site of the Panopticon Theatre, a popular movie house. But as I see it now, it has no marquee and no box office, and instead has an ornate set of doors with another golden chicken above them. Can you explain how and why it is different?"

"Certainly," the Wolluf said. "The building as you have known it contains a movie theater, but a hundred years earlier it was the Temple of the Mystic Brotherhood, a popular secret society or lodge to which many prominent citizens of Poughkeepsie
belonged in the early and mid-nineteenth century. The golden chicken is their insignia."

"So is it a hundred years earlier here?" I asked the Wolluf.

"In places," the Wolluf said.

"In places?" I asked.

"Time is unstable here," the Wolluf said. "The building is as it was a hundred or more years before you knew it in Poughkeepsie, but here in Apokeepsing, it may be much older than that, or it may exist in the future. And the building next to it, which is a Portuguese bakery in your time, might be of a whole different time period, older, newer, not built yet, or long ago collapsed into a heap of dust."

"And the building next to that, which is designed to look like a gigantic green pepper. Where does that come from, time-and-space-wise?"

"I have no idea," the Wolluf said. "And to add to the confusion, since this is an unstable plane, what you are seeing now may be changed, or not here, or mean something else tomorrow."

"In other words, a mishmash," Molly said.

"I believe that was how I described it," the Wolluf said.

"I have done comparatively little television-watching in my young life," Molly said. "Since my
early days were off with the dwergs of the mountains, and I didn't have a regular home, really, until I landed at the loony bin—and there, of course, the TV is on all the time—but I am sure I have seen fifty stories with a premise just like this."

"Well, of course," the Wolluf said. "They love to make those because they can reuse sets and scenery from other shows ... and let's say they have half enough cowboy costumes, and half enough Nazi costumes. They just write a script about a world where there are Nazis and cowboys. It's a cheap device used in movies too. Pretty soon fiction writers will start using it in books."

"So why did you bring us here?" I asked. "Not that it isn't very interesting."

"I thought I would show you something in the Temple of the Mystic Brotherhood," the Wolluf said. "They have a sort of museum of antiquities and curiosities there."

"Okay, let's go in," I said.