World's End (3 page)

Leif Perplexon was never seen again.

Alfonso, who was just nine at the time, waited by the edge of the lake for days, hoping that his father would miraculously reappear. Leif was eventually presumed dead, though his body was never found. In the months and even years after Leif's funeral, Alfonso clung to this strange academic text by Dr. Jarislav Lützen. It was the last thing that Leif Perplexon had ever read, and just by having it nearby Alfonso felt closer to his father.

Alfonso held the architectural field guide in his hands, leaned back against the ship's hull, and thought about his father. Leif and Uncle Hill were both born in Somnos, the last city of Dormia. In the confusion of Great Wandering Day, Leif and Hill, who were both young boys at the time, were pushed through the gates with a group of Wanderers. Miraculously, the boys survived the harsh conditions of the Ural Mountains and were eventually discovered by a sea captain who took them back to North America. Leif ended up in World's End, Minnesota, where he married Alfonso's mom, Judy, and found long-sought domestic happiness.

This was pretty much everything that Alfonso knew about his father's past. It was painfully little. His mother could have probably told him more, but she was the silent type. What's more, it seemed to grieve her to dredge up memories of her deceased husband. Alfonso didn't have the heart to press her on this.

Still, Alfonso did have a few memories of his father. Above all, he remembered the walks that he and his dad used to take in the primeval Forest of the Obitteroos, which surrounded his house in World's End. Many of the trees were centuries old and most were extremely tall. Some of the oldest trees, which had been around since Roman times, stood more than three hundred feet in height. Alfonso and Leif would often walk through the forest at dusk, a magical time when the pine needles glowed like copper shavings and animals came out to drink from the streams. Often fog rolled off the surrounding lakes and settled so thickly that it was impossible to see more than several feet in any one direction.

On one occasion, an especially thick fog rolled in and the two of them were separated. Alfonso had chased after a rabbit and when he finally looked up, his father was gone. Alfonso was reasonably certain that he knew the way home, even in the fog, but he decided instead to search for his father. He searched for hours. It wasn't until midnight drew near that, quite by accident, Alfonso stumbled into his dad. Leif looked terrified. It was the only time that Alfonso could recall seeing fear in his father's eyes.

"If you ever find that I am missing, and you know the way home, you mustn't look for me," Leif had said sternly.

"I'll always look for you," said Alfonso tearfully.

"No," replied Leif with a shake of his head. "Sometimes it's best not to."

Those words echoed in Alfonso's head as he sat in the hull of the Romanian freighter. He sighed and stared at the familiar blue-gray cover of Dr. Lützen's book. Finally, he flipped it open to chapter seventeen, which was titled The Three Sphinxes. The chapter began with a drawing of three sphinxes, each with the trademark head of a woman, body of a lion, and wings of a bird. Beneath the drawing Leif had written the following:

 

The sphinxes from my dreams ... Which one of
them has the watchful eye?

 

Leif had written a few other sentences but they were impossible to read because the book had been rained on and the ink had run. Alfonso had found the book lying face-open on the Perplexons' front lawn while Leif was swimming in Lake Witekkon.

Alfonso closed the book and sat silently on the freighter's wooden floor. He felt the churn of its heavy diesel motors. As he stared into the gathering darkness, he thought about his dad—his smile, the roughness of his beard, and how his dark green eyes twinkled as he watched a loon skim the surface of the cold Minnesota water.

An hour or two later, Alfonso leapt to his feet when he heard a great clattering of feet overhead. Then the engines on the boat began to drone more softly and Alfonso could feel the ship slowing down. "Alexandria," he mumbled to himself. At that moment, his eyes drooped heavily with fatigue. Alfonso fought this drowsiness and, as quickly as he could, shoved his belongings into his backpack. He then lay down on the dank floor of the ship and prepared for sleep.

A
LFONSO STARED
at the body of a man lying face-down in the snow. He was in the mountains somewhere, perhaps the Urals, but he couldn't be sure. The sky was a dull charcoal color and a heavy snow was falling. He stood in a long corridor of extremely tall hedgerows and shivered violently. He was freezing.

As if obeying an unseen force, he knelt down next to the fallen man and turned him over. The man was dead. More alarming than this, however, was that the man was Leif Perplexon, his father. Alfonso shuddered but, instead of looking away, focused on two small puncture wounds, about an inch apart, located midway down his father's neck. The skin around the punctures was tinged a gray blue, in stark contrast to the grim off-white color of the rest of his neck. Alfonso stared at the image of his father until it disappeared.

It had been a nightmare.

Alfonso blinked furiously as if to ensure that what he was
now
seeing was real. He was standing in a darkened alleyway. The air was warm and balmy. Alfonso spun around and saw a large port, where several dozen freighters were anchored alongside stone jetties. One of these freighters was the
Somnolenţă,
the ship that brought him from Marseilles.

Now what?

The port was deserted and spooky, and Alfonso walked quickly and passed several low-slung warehouses, abandoned forklifts, and fluorescent streetlights that flickered a dull yellow. Every so often he'd hear a
crack
in the distance that sounded like gunfire. The only signs of life were mangy dogs that eyed him warily. The air was filled with a myriad of smells—a mix of spices, seaweed, cigarette smoke, and urine. In the distance, Alfonso could hear the minarets calling worshipers to their prayers.

Eventually, Alfonso came upon a more populated area, a handful of open shops clustered along a crumbling four-lane road. Here he found a taxi driver who said, in very broken English, that he would accept dollars. The man's taxi was an ancient Mercedes, and the painted exterior had long since corroded and flaked off leaving only a coat of rust.

The driver, a wizened old man with white hair coming out of his ears, looked at him through the rearview mirror. "Where to go?" asked the man eagerly.

"The Three Sphinxes," replied Alfonso.

"Three Sphinxes—yes, yes, yes," he said. "I take you there, finest good sir." Then he smiled, showing two teeth in his mouth, one hanging from the upper jaw and the other from the lower jaw.

Ten minutes later, the taxi pulled up in front of a crumbling brick building; the narrow entranceway was occupied by a very heavyset man smoking a water pipe, called a
nargeelah.
It gave off a smoky, candy apricot smell.

"What's this?" asked Alfonso.

"This is Three Sphinxes," replied the taxi cab driver. He pointed to a sign above the building's entranceway, which read:
THREE SPHINXES HOTEL-CHEAP ROOMS
&
ROOFTOPS AVAILABLE
.

Alfonso was about to say he didn't mean for the driver to take him to the Three Sphinxes Hotel, but then he realized it didn't matter. It was a hotel, and he needed a place to sleep. He paid the driver and left the taxi. The man smoking the nar-geelah motioned for him to come closer.

"You want a room, fella?" asked the man. He had a bald head and a neck that rippled with at least half a dozen chins. "I am innkeeper."

Alfonso nodded.

The innkeeper showed Alfonso to his room. It was tiny, with enough room for a single bed, a rickety chair, a sink, and a small window near the ceiling that had been painted shut. As the innkeeper was about to leave, Alfonso asked him if he could arrange a visit to the ancient ruins known as the Three Sphinxes.

"Forget the Three Sphinxes," said the innkeeper dismissively. "It is top name for hotel, but not such a good place to visit. You must visit Pompey's Pillar."

"No thanks," said Alfonso politely. "I really want to see the Three Sphinxes."

"As you please," replied the innkeeper. "The sphinxes guard the tomb of the pharaoh Khafra. You know this, eh? One is said to be weeping in grief, another laughing because Khafra took so many riches with him to the afterlife, and a third sleeping because the pharaoh had at last found rest."

"Sleeping?" inquired Alfonso.

"Yes," replied the innkeeper. "The third of the sphinxes is the so-called Sleeping Sphinx."

Alfonso nodded.

"Good night," said the innkeeper.

Once he was alone, Alfonso took a closer look at his surroundings. The dirty yellow walls felt like they were closing in on him. He felt stifled and anxious. Alfonso thought of his mother. By now, certainly, someone had informed her that he had gone missing. He would have to call her first thing in the morning.

Alfonso sat on the bed. It squeaked as a plume of dust rose from the faded green bedspread. He opened his backpack, to distract himself from his fears as much as to make sure that everything was there. One by one, he lifted out his belongings. It was comforting to see these familiar objects in such a foreign place. He paused to examine his blue sphere. It was roughly the size of an orange, but it weighed almost nothing. Alfonso had found it in Straszydlo Forest, on the way to Somnos, three years before. The sphere was a curious thing. It could fly through the air with the force of a cannonball and then return to Alfonso's outstretched hand with the gentleness of a fluttering feather.

But that wasn't all.

Lately, he had discovered a new aspect to the sphere: whenever Alfonso spun it like a top in his hand, images flickered across its round, glassy surface. The images were always of a monk, dressed in a robe, with a single eyeball situated in the middle of his forehead. This was, without a doubt, the same monk whose stone statue Alfonso had come across in the Straszydlo Forest. The images were scattered and usually unrelated. The monk walked, or sat at a desk, or ate. Sometimes more interesting images appeared, such as the monk arguing furiously with several people, their faces hidden in the shadows. There didn't seem to be any obvious meaning behind these scenes or any storyline that might connect them all together. The scenes simply repeated themselves cyclically. However, at that moment, as he held the sphere in the dusty, stifling hotel room, a new image appeared.

The one-eyed monk was walking quickly through a snowy labyrinth of hedges. It was the exact same labyrinth that Alfonso had dreamed about—the one in which he'd seen his father lying dead in the snow.

E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING
, Alfonso set out from the hotel. The first order of business was to telephone his mother. It was late in the evening in World's End when he called from a pay phone near his hotel. From the sound of her voice, she had been frantic with worry. Alfonso explained that he had simply fallen asleep and committed some "tomfooleries"—this was the word that his family used to describe the crazy things that he occasionally did in his sleep. Alfonso assured his mom, repeatedly, that he was staying at a nice hotel called the Three Sphinxes in Alexandria, Egypt.

"Egypt!" screamed his mother, so loudly that Alfonso nearly dropped the phone. "Are you playing some sort of joke on me?"

"No," said Alfonso as cheerfully as he could. "I'm really in Egypt. Don't worry, it's nice. Beautiful weather here this time of year."

"Oh my dear, dear, dear boy," said his mother. "Don't move from the hotel and don't go to sleep! I'm calling Mayor Ehrstrom here in World's End. He has a cousin stationed with the Air Force over in Turkey and he'll know what to do. I'll send someone to pick you up just as soon as I can. Someone from the U.S. Embassy most likely. It may take a few hours, dear, so I just want you to stay at that hotel of yours and don't talk to anyone. Okay?"

"Okay," Alfonso replied.

Once this call was completed, Alfonso quickly set out for the local bus station to find the Sleeping Sphinx. The innkeeper had written out directions for him. They involved a bus trip to a place called Al Alamayn, which the innkeeper had written for him in Arabic:
. Of course, this was against his mother's instructions, but he suspected it would take her several hours, if not an entire day, to find someone to pick him up. In the meantime, he had no interest in waiting in the hotel, doing nothing.

After thirty minutes of walking through the streets of dusty, noise-filled downtown Alexandria, Alfonso arrived at the central bus terminal. He expected a large building with many separate terminals, but instead found an enormous parking lot filled with buses belching diesel fumes. There were all types of buses—luxurious tourist cruisers with complimentary snacks and juices, bone-rattling city buses, and small minivans that wheezed and coughed as if diseased. Eventually, Alfonso came upon a minivan with bald tires, a rear bumper attached by several pieces of string, and a roof stacked with no less than two dozen bicycles. In the front windshield there was a placard that read,
. The driver, a teenager who didn't look much older than Alfonso, rolled down the driver's side window.