Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (11 page)

The window was very slow in closing. The sight of life and light on Earth just lingered and lingered. But eventually it was gone.

I was alone. I did not bother to claw the antlike swarms of specks from my eyes. What was the point? What was there to look at?

And why was I alive? No organism could live in this environment.

When I was young, Alexei told me the male Mastodon was too big to fit inside Noah’s Ark and so it slipped and fell off the deck, which is why they were extinct.

Alexei saw the spirit of lunar desolation and horror grip me, so he smirked and walked away and left me alone. I hid in a private place of mine, because I could open the downstairs closet door, and sit in the little triangle of hall carpet formed by that door and the back corner; and rock back and forth.

I remember being unable to cease from imagining a scene: an elephantine head, rain dripping from shaggy skull and sail-like ears, raising its trunk to trumpet again and again at the shape of his bewildered mate on the receding stern of the vast square boat, the world’s one and only ship, glimpsed between monstrous waves, but vanishing into the gray rain. I remember how I imagined the great thick legs of the strongest creature in the ancient world slowing, slowing, as they thrashed in the endless sea, not strong enough to keep that head and trunk above water. I could almost see it.

How many minutes, or hours, I hung there, I cannot say. I am not sure if time actually ran according to schedule there. I could not tell if I was falling, was stuck in one spot in zero gravity, was spinning, or frozen in black amber.

Zero gee, by the way, makes your feet itch, makes you want to go to the bathroom all the time, and makes your head ache like you’ve been held upside down by your brothers until you are red-faced. Our bodies are not designed to have their fluids evenly distributed top to bottom. Astronauts don’t like to talk about that unglamorous part of weightlessness, but keep in mind this throbbing headache and bladder-ache and toe-numbness was going on in the background of all the other various unpleasant physical sensations I was suffering.

Panic ebbed. Your body just cannot keep up the flood of adrenaline forever. Fear turned into a sort of bitter curiosity: I wondered about the texture and substance around me. It angered me that it made no sense.

It did not seem to have any fixed character, any nature. At once it seemed to be one thing or the other, whatever was worst for me: It was just darkness and vacuum, a yawning gap through which I toppled, offering me nothing to hold to and nowhere to stand; but it seemed also to be a gluey, oily substance sticking to me greedily, so I could barely move my limbs; then it seemed also like nothing but a fog of gloom, a deadly smoke, which blocked nothing but my eyesight; and then also it seemed to be an anthill, and millions of little bugs were crawling over me, nipping and tickling; and then it seemed also like space itself had shattered like fine crystal shattering, and these were all the little sharp shards and grit, working their way into my flesh.

Or it was none of these things. My sense impressions were evolved and meant to record information within the context of space and time. Was I still inside that context? I doubted it.

I also was burning with a will to survive that blazed up inside of me as hot as anger, a rage that anyone or anything in this universe or outside it would take from me my precious mortal existence.

And yet I did not die. I hung in vacuum or fell through darkness or sank in oily glue or spun dizzily or stood buried in ice or coated with swarms of bugs — and for a time, I did nothing. Maybe it was a long time. The curiosity was not enough to get me to move. The will to survive was not strong enough: it was not bigger than this infinity around me.

The thought of my mother saved me. Go ahead and laugh, but that is all it was. I thought: my dad is not crazy. This unreality I am stuck in, it is real. Sort of. That means he could be right about Mom. Maybe she can see me.

I imagined her using some machine they have in her world they don’t have on Earth, a magic mirror or a crystal ball, and seeing my brothers safe, and seeing me, dying in the darkness of utter night, and not being able to get a message to them and tell them what had become of me, and not being able to help me herself, even though she ached to help her little boy.

I opened my mouth and shouted, “I am not a little boy anymore! I can take care of myself!” And got a mouthful of those little specks of whatever they were that swarmed like ants.

I tried to spit, but there was neither air in my lungs or saliva in my mouth at that point. I felt terrible, and I had that nightmare sensation of something crawling inside me like a plastic bag of worms.

“Okay, Mom!” I said, “Maybe I am still a little little. A little. If you can help me from wherever you are, or if you can see me, I could use a hand.”

And I heard a huge noise in the abyss, a roar too deep to be heard, the kind of thing you only feel in your bones.

It was cutting through the waters (or whatever I was in) and I felt it moving near, thrusting me aside with its bow shock.

I was desperate to see what it was! I remember trying to claw the goop out of my eyes, and then suddenly realizing that I was merely in a dark void, and I could not remove the darkness by pushing it away with my fingers.

So I pulled that big flashlight up from my belt and clicked the switch.

I was not expecting it to work. I mean, the twilight prevents gunpowder from igniting, so why should batteries work? But they did.

It was like I had set off a silent bomb. A cone of light appeared, and all the motes of darkness trembled, swarmed, and scattered away from the beam. Those that did not scatter fast enough ignited like flash paper. There was no heat. Each dot or crumb of dark substance popped like a dandelion puff made of photons. It was like seeing sparklers from the Fourth of July, like fireflies, like stars that flared and vanished in a second.

There was sort of a chain reaction, as the light from the lightning-bug puffs of sparkle set the motes of grime nearest the cone from my lamp also to sparkle, flare, and vanish with a bluish hue; and their light ignited a concentric cone slightly farther away with slightly less energy, and so the hue was greener and dimmer. The green sparks created a larger and dimmer concentric cone of yellow-orange; and the fringes of that were cherry-red. Did I call it a bomb? A rainbow erupted from my flashlight, or a peacock made of heatless fire, or a silent tornado of pyrotechnics. It was beautiful.

The light was so pretty that I did not realize at first that my cone of light had a solid base. There was a circle of yellow metal reflecting back at me. It was mirror-bright, and its depth was the shadow of a humanoid figure with wings and a tail and a star in his hand, moving to match the motions of my lamp.

A demon? No. A reflection. The wings were my bathrobe-tails, and the tail was the scabbard of my katana.

The golden wall was blurred, as if I were seeing a windowless skyscraper’s wall stream past me, blurred with the speed of my fall. But it was not a wall, and I felt no sensation of motion. It was a hull, moving at immense velocity, only yards from my position.

For a really weird moment, I thought my Mom had sent a submarine to come get me. It was the side of a prism-shaped freight-train rushing past me in the deep, and it was moving so quickly that it was blurred into what seemed a solid wall. I saw how the oily nothing of the non-medium curdled and tumbled into froth like blue-gray cream by the friction of its passage.

Of course. This was the second invasion-sized Moebius coil trying to shoot through the spot where an open doorway should have been waiting for it.

The doorway, in other words, I had just seen close ever so slowly.

How could the power sending the machines know that a big-eyed native girl in glasses with a really attractive figure and a sweet face could light a broomstick on fire and collapse the twilight door?

For that matter, how had she done that? Who makes broomsticks that shut Moebius coils? I mean, granted, if any place on Earth should have a magic broomstick, it should be a place called the Haunted Museum. But if no place on Earth could manufacture such a broomstick, then maybe Penny was not a native girl. Not native to our planet, I mean.

In any case, there I was, a yard or so from where the doorway had been, and so only a yard or so from the machine speeding silently past the now-vacant target spot. There was no propulsion in the back that I could see, but instead a socket the size of a train tunnel opening into a complex of rings and braces, an intricate curvilinear pattern of electromagnets and accelerators, forming a pattern of black and gold like the stripes on a bumblebee.

It was some sort of supercollider, but what exotic or fundamental particles it created or destroyed, I could not guess. All I knew was that the little breadboard copy of one of these machines in the Museum basement had opened a hole in timespace large enough to see with the naked eye. The Professor’s copy of this machine held more power than the Super Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, and it was a handmade toy. This behemoth was longer than a football field, wider than two Mack trucks occupying two lanes of highway.

I did not see anything like props or propellers or rocket exhaust. Were these things being shot like a bolt from a honking humongous crossbow?

I saw the tail receding like the caboose of a bullet train, or the tailfins of a rocket. Then the mighty golden machine was gone, and I was once more like the last Mastodon that had fallen off of the Ark, ensuring the extinction of my species.

Now for the Double Jeopardy Bonus Round question: was there going to be a third one?

The Dark Tower had shot a trio of little Moebius coils into the basement, not one. If you were invading an extradimensional world, wouldn’t you? That way, if the first one got broken hitting and killing the Wicked Witch of the East, you’d still have two spares.

So, I needed to get to that point in nonbeing-ness if I was to encounter the third invasion-sized dragon machine.

Now comes the weird part. Okay, strike that.
Yet Another
weird part. But even grading on a curve, this was weird. I began to think that what I was thinking was changing the reality around me. The unreality. The whatever.

The substance seemed somehow
friendlier
when it was all colored like a polychromatic rainbow, streamers of motes all flashing like magnesium sparks or mad, momentary fireflies.

I waved my arms and legs in the vacuum, trying my hardest to believe it was glue or oil after all, so that I could get some forward propulsion. That seemed to work. When I felt specks in my eyes, up my nose or in my lungs, I tried my hardest to imagine that I was in vacuum, and that there was nothing solid there, only empty darkness. That seemed to work too.

But then, when I was in vacuum, waving my limbs only spun me in a circle. So I told myself I was an idiot, donned my night-vision goggles, turned the amplification up full, and turned off the flashlight again. That saved on battery power, and freed up my hands. The specks of grime were more aggressive when the light was gone, and soon thick enough to swim through, but this time the night vision goggles kept the imaginary swarms out of my eyes.

After slorping and sloshing forward maybe fifteen times my body length, I stopped. This time, I was not bit or stung. The crawly sensation had changed to a feeling like I was swimming in ginger ale or turpentine, not acid.

Of course, I did not know really where the spot was they were aiming at. I did not know they would try to fire again. I did not know if the spot were standing still or moving relative to me. I did not know that I was not totally insane and having a nightmare while doped to the gills in the nuthouse, in the cell right next door to the professor’s. Which would have been a relief, come to think of it. Better than being here.

No, I was just acting this all out on faith. You make your best guess and take your best shot.

What, you think it is unscientific or unreasonable to act this way? Hey, you can stay back in the black oily glop if you like, covered with swarming little specks of nonexistence, but I am at least going to try to get out. Because what if Mom was actually watching me? I did not want her to see me give up and die. She would think she had raised a quitter.

Maybe time went by. Maybe it did not.

The fact that the motes or flecks seemed less aggressive and annoying when I was in good spirits fascinated me. I found after a little experimentation that I could
wish
the medium into a more solid form just by the power of concentrating and picturing what I wanted in my head.

I crossed my legs and sat in the middle of nonbeing. I made it solid under my butt, sort of the consistency of gritty mud. Living mud that writhed and goosed me. I could clear a little zone away from my head at the same time, making it sort of like fog rather than solid. In between was something more like fluid, so picture me sitting in the darkness up to my neck in water, up to my waist in sticky glue, sitting on a muddy anthill. Comfy.

That seemed to work, which confirms the theory you no doubt have at this point that exposure to extra-dimensional what-the-heck-is-this-don’t-tell-me substance distorts a person’s mind after a while.

Well, hold off on your theory for right now. It is about to get weirder.

It was not much of a world, but it was mine, and I had created it out of Uncreation just with my brain. My new universe was about as large in diameter as you would reach from fingertip to fingertip extending your arms, toetip to toetip extending your legs. I did not really have gravity, but the sensation of falling had left me because I was used to it. It was roughly spherical, the bottom half was muck, and the top half was drench.

“I dub thee, Asteroid Oobleck! Finest tourist trap in all Uncreation!” I shouted, or would have shouted if I had been able to make noise in here.