I headed left along the wall, following my wizard senses until I found another small hole. “Here, Hunter!” I scuttled into the opening.
Hunter didn’t have time to crawl, sliding in like a baseball player. The earthen tidal wave smashed into the wall behind him and filled the tunnel with dust. I covered my head, but the debris still flew up my nose. Even Hunter, who’d guarded his head with his jacket, ended up choking on dirt. The horrible shaking slowed to a feeble tremble then vanished completely. My throat ached from coughing so hard, and I’m sure Hunter’s didn’t feel much better. A slight aftershock hit the tunnel, threatening to cave the whole thing in, but it only caused some dirt to trickle down from the ceiling.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, you?”
“I’m good. Let’s get out of here.”
We crawled until we reached a thin spot in the wall. Even though the vines felt like brambles cutting into my skin, I ripped them away and widened the hole. Once the branches had thinned enough, I shoved my way through to the other side. Hunter came out after me and brushed himself off. Our journey took us into a fogless boscage with perfectly lined aspen trees arranged into rows. An eerie stillness pervaded the grove, as if the place lay frozen in time, whisked away from the changing hours and seasons. High above, the night sky—the stars themselves had vanished, leaving behind a shadowy nothingness. Strangely, though no moon stamped the sky, a light still permeated this place: a dim umber glow, hazy and dreamlike. Truly this place responded to its own strange physics. My wizard senses told me we stood between unknown possibilities. It felt like I was being torn in two directions, but this place pulled me into millions. Indeed, we’d found the verge—the verge between worlds.
The ground underfoot felt like ash, and a sooty stench clung to the air. Either the Institute didn’t know about the verge, or they didn’t have a proper way to seal it up. Knowing that, and that they’d botched our mind-wipe, gave me confidence that the Institute wasn’t an undefeatable monolith. Wizards, with all their miraculous abilities, were still just woefully flawed humans.
Alison’s voice broke the quiet, calling for Hunter and me. I followed her aura until I found the others.
“Johnny, what happened?” Alison asked when she saw me.
“Hunter fell off an escarpment and we got separated. What was that monster out there?”
“Perhaps a Void-spawn indentured to the Institute,” Luther said. “I’ve never been foolhardy enough to study it closely. It’s time.” He reached into the air and parted reality to one side like a curtain. A hole in the fabric of space appeared, and beyond it a stygian corridor with billowing black curtains for walls. An ominous feeling poured out of the opening like a warning. Walking into that passage was unpredictable, possibly even dangerous.
“This is a rather common manifestation of the cave,” Luther said. “There’s no telling what you’ll find navigating the Cave of Miracles. To keep wizards from freely traveling between worlds, the cave plays tricks on them, so they’ll become lost inside forever. Your powers should return to you beyond the threshold—they should flow from you as easily as they do in Everywhen. Remember to push through whatever strangeness you find within. Wizards are masters of their own destinies. If you get lost, just search for one another’s auras. After this tunnel, we will arrive somewhere in the City at the End of the World.”
“What’s that?” Alison asked.
“It is every city that ever was, ever will be, and ever has been, collected like puzzle pieces in one place. A world trapped somewhere between dreams and reality. The location in which you’ll emerge is likely to be random. Remember to track one another using your auras. Do not, under any circumstances, use magic within the city. It is forbidden.” He gave us one more wary scan. “This is all I can offer before we enter.” He looked unsure about going in with us, but we’d come too far and he knew we couldn’t turn back. Our escape had thrown the Dreamhaven into high alert.
Luther stepped into the opening and vanished.
Alison started into the passage, briefly glancing back at the Dreamhaven—saying goodbye before walking into the corridor with Blake. Hunter entered ahead of me, and I followed.
Chapter 10
The Cave of Miracles lay between worlds like the thread on a spiderweb adjoining two pearls of water. Its blustery walls resembled satin sheets, with a phantasmal yet forceful touch. I wanted to stay on a narrow path because I dreaded getting lost, but these corridors denied our passage. Their disorienting folds wrapped around me, swallowed me, and stole Hunter from my grasp.
“Hunter?” I called, fighting against the twisting curtains. But they spun me in circles and I became lost in their curves and bends. They surrounded me, melting into pure darkness. Fear compelled me to keep moving until I appeared suddenly in my old living room in Chicago. Right behind me, I spotted Dad in his recliner, his dormant eyes absorbing images dancing on a television set. I was overcome by horror, thinking that the Dreamhaven impostor had followed me. Then I recalled Luther’s warning: To keep wizards from freely traveling between worlds, the cave plays tricks on them. The cave wielded Everywhen’s madness amplified.
Dad remained motionless, not responding to me or the TV or anything. Worse than a copy—a husk. A memory that forgot to fade. I reached my index finger toward his cheek and made an indention in his skin. Then his head exploded into a million hairy moths. The monstrous little things skittered all over me. One landed on my nose. I focused on it—its tiny face looked like mine; it stared at me with my own eyes before its face transformed, resembling my mother’s. And with another shift, it turned to television static. I closed my eyes and told myself it wasn’t real. When I opened them again, I was still standing in my old living room. The floor lurched forward, going vertical, sending me sliding, crashing into the bay window. Nothing but darkness outside—the Void’s gaping maw, waiting for the glass to break and drop me. But the room fussed like a hyper child refusing to stay in one place. It turned upside down, throwing me onto the ceiling. The world threatened to continue spinning, so I pressed my eyes again and remembered that my powers expanded limitlessly in the dreamworld. I didn’t need much to summon myself back in the black-curtained hallway.
A hand landed on my shoulder, triggering panic. “Johnny!” Hunter said, sounding perfectly sober.
“You’re not drunk anymore? How do you feel?”
“Fine. It’s like nothing was ever wrong with me.”
The Dreamhaven’s laws seem to have faded when we crossed the threshold into the Cave of Miracles. Our dream bodies changed into real ones, and all the clothes from the dreamworld became real too. Wherever the Institute had been keeping us, the cave’s magic transported us from that place and dropped us here—wherever here was.
“Hunt, let’s hurry and find everyone before we get lost in this place forever.”
We pushed through curtains until we found ourselves in a building with exposed brick walls and rafters with visible piping. Gnarled witch faces and gilded Venetian masks hung next to princess dresses and jester suits on gridwall panels and garment racks. A twenty-something woman slumped lazily behind a counter wreathed in colorful string lights and Mardi Gras beads near the front. She pulled her hair up into a taut bun, leaned forward, and squinted at us. Hunter and I were partially hanging out of a dressing room. The cave’s winding black labyrinth had disappeared.
“A costume store?” Hunter said.
“Where are we?” I asked the clerk.
She gave a clueless shrug. “Brooklyn?”
I sensed the others’ auras, and tapped a knuckle against Hunter’s arm and checked his face to confirm that he was feeling the same thing. He nodded knowingly, and we headed for the door.
A steam cloud swept past us as we walked outside. When it cleared, the road before us appeared split between two worlds: one side, ours, had an asphalt street with yellow lines painted on it,
a stop sign around the corner, and a light directing traffic; on the other side, the road was cobbled, and people in Victorian clothing were walking alongside horse-drawn carriages. A fourteen-year-old newsie stood on a wooden crate, hawking newspapers. He was too far away to glimpse the headlines.
The glare from the sunlight hurt my eyes. It was brighter than the sun in our world.
“Johnny, where are we?”
“Luther said that after we left the Cave of Miracles, we would come to the City at the End of the World.”
A brass machine standing barely a foot tall, with flat feet that chattered like gag teeth and a big round nose, scuttled across the pavement in front of us. Its jerky body swayed side to side as it hustled to join three other machines like it. Each one resembled an upside-down bucket, and metal swoops under their noses imitated moustaches. They gathered around a hole in the sidewalk. One machine came apart into segments, like a toy. A hose emerged from inside it and started pouring wet cement into the spot. Another one came apart and smoothed the cement with a concrete placer that extended from a pole within its body. The machines made chirping noises and disbanded in opposite directions once they’d finished. Disbelief froze me in place. Hunter nudged me and we started moving again.
We kept to our side of the road and followed the others’ auras west, to the crosswalk. A golden machine hovered in the intersection and directed traffic there. Its crude metal body lacked arms—its simple rounded head rested between two spherical shoulders, and its lower body widened at the top but drove to a point at the bottom, like an upside-down pyramid. Underneath the machine, a spinning halo two feet in diameter hummed quietly nearly a foot off the ground.
“What the hell is that thing?” Hunter said.
“What the hell is anything in here?”
Anachronisms abounded in the strange city. While we waited on a modern-looking street corner, a short way down, to our left, the city grew older. The cement buildings turned to brick and bore dated signage. One lit up marquee read LG Stone Fine Dressing. A guy with a flattop strutted down the sidewalk carrying an ’80s-style boom box on his shoulder. Even more unusual, every car in traffic exhibited impenetrably smoky windows. Hunter hunched next to a brown sedan and used his sleeve to clear the glass on the passenger side, but no matter how much he rubbed, it stayed opaque.
The light changed colors, but traffic didn’t move. The cars, and their drivers, colorlessly emulated life on our world. Same for the nineteenth century set piece across the street: That newspaper boy would stand on that same corner, peddling that same paper, forever. Time had no meaning here. No one here intended to go anywhere. Ever. The City at the End of the World was like a bunch of Lego pieces jumbled in a toy box, with nothing coherently stacked to resemble a “real” world. Or maybe my pale human reasoning simply failed to grasp the scheme behind its arrangement.
Hunter and I crossed the street, and although the era stayed the same, our surroundings changed to resemble Chicago, not New York. Alison, Blake, and Luther loitered at a hot dog stand on a corner northwest of us, not too far away. Luther no longer wore his Dreamhaven disguise. He looked like the same old sinewy man I’d met long ago.
“I would kill for a hot dog,” I said, holding my stomach.
Hunter pointed to the others. “Let’s go hit the old man up for some food.”
Alison looked relieved to see us approaching. “J, you scared the crap out of me. You’ve got to stop disappearing like that. Where’d you go?”
“A . . . costume shop?”
“We popped up in the backroom of a sporting good’s store,” Blake said.
“Hey, old man,” Hunter said, evoking a sinister glare from Luther, “buy us something to eat. We’re starving.”
It took Luther a second to recover from Hunter’s impudence. “I’m not here looking for a snack.” Luther returned to the scraggly haired man behind the cart. “BJ—”
“That guy’s name is BJ?” Hunter said, cracking a smile.
Luther kept a harsh eye on Hunter. “BJ, have you seen any agents around?”
“Not today.”
Luther thanked the vendor and headed up the sidewalk, toward another crossing.
“Who was that?” I asked as we followed. “What is this place? What were all those machines back there?”
“Perhaps one question at a time?” Luther said.
“What about that guy, who was he?”
“An informant of mine. One of the city’s many denizens.”
“Do these people really just . . . live here or something?” Alison asked.
“Exist is a more appropriate term. Yes, most of the entities you see exist here and only here. You may run across the occasional wizard, but it’s extremely rare.”
Blake caught up to Luther and walked beside him. “You called these people . . . entities?”
“They are conceptuals—archetypes of people that may, can, or do exist.”
Lego people living in a Lego city, I thought to myself.
Alison looked back at the hot dog guy. “What was that guy an archetype of?”
“A nosy food vendor who knows more than he should.”
“What about those robots?” I asked.
“We call the small ones ‘hobs.’ I’ve never seen them do anything but maintain the city. The larger ones we call ‘guardians.’” Luther stopped at the crosswalk. The light was red for us, but the cars weren’t moving. Hunter put a foot forward, ready to cross. Luther blocked him with his forearm. “If you break any of the city’s myriad rules, including using magic, which is banned throughout, the guardians will remove you, often casting you back to where you came from.”
Hunter, acknowledging Luther’s warning, stepped back.
“Who made them? Who made any of this?”
“Do you know the story the Institute tells of how the world was made?”
The light turned green. Luther walked across the street, heading for a four-story building. We followed, me reciting the creation myth as I knew it: “The Creators escaped the Void and tried to make a paradise of eternal love, but the Void-spawns hunted them down and destroyed their paradise, so they used the cogs and wheels they’d made and built a new world—our world. That clockwork is the vivit apparatus. The Void-spawns chased the Creators into our world and hunted them down, but then the Void-spawns got stuck and couldn’t go back to the Void, so they became mortal. Wizards are probably their descendants.”
“I’m not inclined to trust most of the pseudo-religious fluff,” Luther said, “but I think there are some scientific accuracies in that legend. This world is a toolbox of concepts. Governments exist street to street, and likewise laws and logic also exist street to street. The laws and government in one part of the city, won’t be the same as those in another. If the Creators did indeed exist, this city was the model for every city that would ever or could ever exist.
“Oneironauts who have spent extensive time exploring the city tell the same myth: The Creators built the city, set in motion all the clockwork to run it, then left. I’ve, admittedly, learned very little about the city. Exploring it is dangerous. The city is like Everywhen in that it is always changing. Without a plan, it would be very easy for a wizard to get lost here forever.”
Like in Everywhen, the vivit apparatus held no command over the city’s physics. The city not only occupied a nexus between worlds, it was the first city—no, the first anything ever created, in any existence. I recalled those machines Luther had called hobs fixing the hole in the sidewalk earlier. The city ran itself using two mechanisms: one to protect and one to maintain.
We reached the run-down four-story building. Its darkly tinted windows made it difficult to see inside. The numbers 60139 were engraved on a brass placard near the entrance. Luther walked up the stoop and entered. A cardinal-headed creature read a 1987 Sports Illustrated magazine behind the reception desk in
the lobby. Atop a three-tier filing cabinet behind the birdman, a miniature TV blared the 1987 World Series. Luther marched ahead, down a hallway and toward an old cage elevator.
Hunter stopped me, drawing my attention to the birdman. “The heck is that?”
“A Cardinals fan?”
“Come along,” Luther said, annoyed with our gawking. The birdman turned a page in his magazine. The crack of a baseball bat echoed behind him.
We caught up with Luther and boarded the elevator. He pulled a lever that pivoted on a half wheel, and the elevator’s metal doors screeched shut. The rickety thing rattled up a few stories, vibrating our teeth the whole way.
“How did you find the Dreamhaven?” Blake asked.
“Rumors that the Institute used a dream prison in Everywhen have been circulating for quite some time. I came to the City at the End of the World and did some investigation, and discovered a portal in the neighborhood we were just in.”
“So, there’re multiple entrances into the Dreamhaven?”
“As you witnessed, more than one portal out of the Dreamhaven exists, so more than one leading in is only logical. Regardless of which portal you use to enter, you always come out through a different one on return. Thanks to you I’ve learned another secret—large parties can get separated in the Cave of Miracles.”
The elevator stopped and Luther slid open the doors. He walked us down a long hallway to a door with no handle at the end of the passage.
“Yes, here,” Luther said. Using his fingers, he traced a circle over the door then marked three dots in the center. The formation turned into a glowing sigil that quickly disappeared. Out of the door grew a brass handle with a simple knob and a keyhole. Luther unlocked the door and opened it. “Sanctuary is through here.”
Chapter 11
An armoire connected the doorway in the City at the End of the World to a cozy study in Sanctuary. With everyone already through, I closed the armoire then opened it again curiously, but no hallway in the City at the End of the World waited on the other side. Now, I found shelves filled with books. In fact, books occupied almost every shelf in the office, and a large Persian rug covered the floor. A pedestal desk sat in the northern corner, tall windows in a row behind it. The three o’clock sun lay in the west, its warm rays dancing across the lavishly varnished furniture.
In the City of the Nightmare King Page 9
