He put his fingers over his eyes and looked at Jim through the spaces among his fingers as if they were prison bars. His voice got shaky.
“Jim, I can’t take no more of this! I’m running off to California, gonna disappear, really drop out. I don’t know what the hell I’ll do there, become a street person, most likely. For a while, anyway. I’ll be taking my guitar, though. I might get into a band. Maybe not. I ain’t what you’d call a great musician, but that never stopped lots of rock stars. Anyway, I’m going to try for it. Anything’ll be better than what I’m doing now.”
Jim was silent for a minute. Sam had dropped his hands onto his lap, but his black eyes were zeroed in on Jim’s face. He seemed to be hoping that … what? That his old buddy would utter wise words that would rescue him?
Jim waved his hand. It was a vague gesture that indicated nothing except possibly hopelessness. What could he, Jim Grimson, incarcerated in a mental ward, wearing borrowed clothes, estranged from just about everybody he could name except for Doctor Porsena and a few patients, the connections with them not really tight, what could he do for his old friend?
He could not help thinking about his own plans, too, though he felt like a big prick worrying about himself when Sam was in such a bad situation. Sam had told him on the phone several days ago that he could live at the Wyzaks’ when he became an outpatient. He and Sam would share the bedroom and Sam’s clothes and eat at Sam’s table. Mrs. Wyzak, big-hearted as ever, had made the offer. She knew that Jim’s parents were in a very small apartment and had no money to help support their son. Jim’s eighteenth birthday was coming up soon. After that, the welfare money allotted for him would be cut off. Besides, Eric Grimson did not want Jim to live with him.
Now that Sam was taking off, would his parents still take his friend in?
Jim cleared his throat and said, “You’re not talking to the wise old man on top of the mountain, the ancient guru who sees all, knows all, who can set you on the right path to health, wealth, and fame. I’m sorry, Sam, but I don’t know what to say except to wish you luck. I could tell you to sign up for Doctor Porsena’s therapy. But he’s got a long waiting list. I was luckier than hell to be admitted so quickly.”
Sam did not reply. His face was unreadable. But Jim thought that he detected reproach and fright in it.
“Jesus, Sam, I want to help you! But I just can’t!”
Sam said, “I didn’t expect nothing from you. You can’t ask a drowning man to save you from drowning. I just thought I’d tell you what I’m going to do. I wasn’t asking for your blessing.”
“Damn, Sam! I feel like shit! I’m failing you!”
“What the hell,” Sam said. He rose from the chair. “Mom won’t refuse you even if I’m not there. In fact, she’ll probably be gladder than ever to have you. Mothering’s her big thing, you know. That and bossing people around.”
His voice broke. Tears oozed out and slid down to the corners of his mouth. “Jesus, when we were kids together, pretty happy, you know, even though things were tough a lot of times, we couldn’t have dreamed that we’d turn out like this.”
Jim could think of nothing better to do than to enfold Sam in his arms and pat his back. That was all he could do, and maybe it was enough. Sam sobbed for a moment, then released himself and wiped the tears with a dirty handkerchief.
“Hey, Jim! We think we’re grown up and don’t need nobody, right! But when the chips are down, as the buffalo hunter said, we turn out to still be babies. I admit I’m a little scared. Why not? I’m just kidding myself when I pretend to be as tough as fried shoe leather. I wouldn’t tell this to anyone but you, Jim. I don’t really want to leave. Things’ve gotten too rough, though. It’s adios, Belmont City! California, here I come! Mom’s going to cry her heart out, but maybe, deep down, she’ll be glad to get rid of me. She won’t have to be on my neck all the time because I’m such a pain in the ass to her.”
“Do you think you could keep in touch with me, write me a postcard now and then?”
“If I can steal a postcard and a pencil,” Sam said. “I won’t have much money.”
He laughed, and he said, “Hey, it might be a lot better than I think! California’s the golden state, ingots of gold laying around on the streets, ice cream cones growing from trees, starlets just aching to lay a skinny, penniless, dumb Polack. At least I won’t freeze my ass off out on the street come winter. And even the garbage cans’ll have food better than what I eat here.”
“Maybe you should think more about it,” Jim said. “Look before you leap, and all that.”
Something came over Jim then. His words of caution suddenly seemed to be those of a coward. It was as if an electrical current running through him had reversed itself and was now running in the opposite direction.
He said, “What the hell, Sam! I don’t mean that! It’ll be a great adventure! It’ll at least be different! Better to live like a lion for a day than like a dog forever! You know for sure you have no future here! Go to California! It’ll be exciting, and it’ll give you hope and endless opportunities! I wish I could go with you!”
Sam blinked as if Jim had disappeared in a blinding light. He said, “What happened to you?” Then, “Why don’t you come with me?”
Jim shook his head. “I would … only …”
“Only what?”
“You’d have to be in my skin to know how I feel about this place, what I’m doing. This is my adventure, Sam, this ward. It’s a world in itself, a world that …”
How could he explain to Sam about the universes of the Lords and his adventures as Red Orc? How could he make Sam understand that golden California was lead compared to the places he had been and to which he would return? No way would Sam comprehend it.
“You always were a little strange, Jim, even though we got along great. What the hell could this puzzle farm have for you? For me, anyway. It’d be nothing.”
He held out his hand. “So long, Jim. Hope we meet again some other place, a better place, too.”
Jim shook his hand. That Sam had offered it instead of embracing him again meant that Sam had already distanced himself. He no longer felt as close to Jim. They were very good friends who had begun to be strangers.
Jim felt sick. That, however, was the way it had to be. Character determined destiny. His had sent him off on a different road from Sam’s. It would have happened sooner or later, anyway. It had come sooner, that was all.
Nevertheless, he felt very sad. He also regretted that he had told Sam that he would be better off opting for adventure. Immediately after thinking this, he changed his mind, and much of the sadness and all of the regret vanished. It really was best for Sam, for anyone, to leave the familiar and to venture into strange country. That is, if the familiar was a place where hopeless hardship and unconquerable failure reigned.
Sam said, “Talk to my mother. She’ll take you in when you need a home. You’ll have to put up with a lot from her, but you won’t starve to death. Just do what she tells you to do.”
Sam turned and walked out without a backward look.
Jim called, “Good luck! I’ll be with you in my thoughts, Sam!”
Sam did not reply.
CHAPTER 17
“Aaagh!”
The cry of the thing attacking Orc and Orc’s cry mingled. Locked together, they were rolling and bouncing down the rocky face of the mountain. Orc had fallen onto his face, taking his attacker with him. Then he had rolled over. The creature had been under him for a moment. It had huge wings, a small body, a very long thin neck, and a head twice as large as his. Its beak was as hooked and as sharp as an eagle’s. Its legs were exceedingly long for a flying creature. The claws were long, sharp, and curved, but they tore loose after their second rollover.
Despite its birdlike appearance, it had no feathers.
The two, three if Jim was counted, rolled and slid and soared down the slope. Both attacker and attacked were banged and bunged and gashed, and both cried out from pain. Then
they slammed into the base of a boulder and stopped. Fortunately for Orc, the creature was between him and the rock when they crashed into it. Its body bones snapped; its wing bones had already cracked during the tumble.
Orc tried to get up so that he could seize the bird-animal around its skinny neck and break it. He was unable to do so. But the thing was also half-paralyzed. Its legs kicked, and it swayed its snakelike neck while its beak opened and shut, clack-clacking. After a minute or so, its enormous yellow eyes glazed, and it was dead.
Orc lay for a long time while the sun slid on its arc across the blue. He saw two creatures like his attacker above him. They were circling, their heads cocked to observe him. He hoped that he could get up before they decided that it was safe for them to land and dine on him. Meanwhile, as long as he was not in danger, he would take his ease. If ease could be called a state in which he hurt everywhere. He had lost skin from many parts of his body, including the private, and what was not scraped away was nearly so. Also, his head, knees, elbows, toe bones, ears, lips, nose, chin, and genitals had been battered many times. The pain in his head told him that he could have a concussion.
“Welcome to Anthema, the Unwanted World!” he muttered.
His father had certainly fixed him. But it would not be forever. If he, Orc, could do anything about it, and he would let nothing stop him, he would find his way to Los and kill him. Nevertheless, he groaned with pain. It was all right to groan and moan and even weep. No one was watching him.
Except me, Jim thought. I’m watching. But it’s OK if he relieves himself with moans and groans. I’m hurting, too, every bit as much as he, and I wish I could moan and groan. I can’t. But when he does it, he’s doing it also for me, though he doesn’t know that.
Jim thought intensely about loosing himself from Orc. He did not want to endure this pain a second longer than he had to. To return to his room in the ward would be to shed this tortured body immediately. But he hung on while telling himself that he would not desert Orc in the next few seconds. Something kept him from leaving. A sense of shame if he abandoned Orc? That was ridiculous. Orc would be neither hurt nor relieved if his invisible and intangible companion left him.
Yet, Jim felt that he would be a coward if he took the easy way out.
During Jim’s battle with himself, Orc had risen and was walking slowly down the slope. Each movement of each limb was an odyssey of pain. Despite this, Orc did not stop. He left the pile of rock fragments at the bottom of the mountain and made his way through the forest. This was mainly trees resembling tall pines but with scarlet tufts at the ends of the branches. Their odor combined that of vanilla and peanuts. Large bushes with barrel trunks from the top of which sprouted twelve long fernlike fronds were in the spaces among the trees. Insects swarmed around the bushes. They seemed to be attracted by a yellow sticky fluid welling up from the base of the fronds. A stench like that of rotten potatoes with a dash of Limburger cheese rose from it.
The trees were populated with mouse-sized flying mammals. They swooped down, gulped insects, and flew back to rest on the branches. One fluttered by close to Orc. He snatched it out of the air, squeezed it until its thin hollow bones broke, ripped off its wings, tore off its head and legs, and drank its blood. Then, using his fingernails, he stripped off its skin and popped it onto his mouth. Chewing slowly so that he could separate the bones from the flesh with his tongue, Orc continued through the woods.
Jim was horrified. At the same time, he felt Orc’s satisfaction at having something to eat. That feeling overcame Jim’s disgust before long.
What Jim came to know quickly, because Orc was thinking about it, was that young Lords were taught how to survive and even flourish in the wilderness. Orc had eaten raw flesh many times before. But when he was able to build a fire he would cook his meat.
There was plenty of flint in this area. He would work it into knives, spearheads, axes, and arrowheads. Then he would kill animals with the weapons he would make and from their skins make clothing and bags. After that, he would build a raft and float down the river.
Eighteen days after deciding this, he arrived on his raft at the broad mouth of the river. Beyond it was a sea.
CHAPTER 18
Someone else was in Orc’s mind.
Jim had been frightened many times since entering the young Lord. That there might be another person or thing sharing Orc’s mind terrified him. It was so … so … loathsome and … creepy-crawly. It made him so sick he would have thrown up if he’d had a stomach and a throat. The presence of a stranger—no doubt threatening—violated him.
Actually, he did not know the exact nature of the outsider who was now inside Orc. The first intimation that someone else—some Thing else—had moved in was two days after Orc had set up camp at the river’s mouth. Jim felt the presence of the other. How could he put into words just how he sensed it? He could not. He just knew that it had not been there until the black moment when he became aware that it was present. It was like seeing the shadow of H. G. Wells’s invisible man. Or like when, as a child, he had waked up in the middle of the night and known that a monster was in the closet and watching him from behind the half-open door. The difference now was there was indeed something in the closet of Orc’s brain. Jim’s imagination had not evoked it from his unconscious mind. It was truly there.
Just how did he know that the thing’s purpose was sinister? The same way, he supposed, that a man dying of thirst in the desert knew why the vulture was circling above him.
When Orc had been within a day’s travel on the raft to the sea, he had awakened that morning in a storm of blue stuff. It had been wind-blown from upriver, and it was composed of hand-sized azure pieces shaped like snowflakes. They gave off a strong walnutty odor. For a few minutes, the flakes were so numerous that Orc could not see more than ten feet away. Abruptly, the downfall thinned. A few flakes spun in, and the storm was over. They did not melt, but most of them were gone by evening. A horde of insects, birds, and animals spurted from the deep woods and devoured the flakes. Those that escaped the feeding frenzy turned brown many hours later and were ignored by the animals.
Orc, seeing this, decided he would share the banquet with them. The flakes felt like dried crystallized fungus. They tasted, however, like cooked and sugared asparagus. He stuffed himself with them though he had to drink a lot of water afterward. They dried out his tissues.
Jim theorized it might contain some sort of virus which infiltrated the eater’s body. Then the virus would latch onto the host’s nervous system and, somehow, change from a disorganized mass to a copy of the host’s neural system. It became that being, or a copy thereof, because it was a ghostly reconstruction of the nerves and brain of the animal it occupied. It dispossessed the host as an identity, and it replaced the host’s consciousness with its borrowed consciousness.
Jim had a figurative headache while thinking about this. He came to realize that he could not know where the thing came from or how it got into Orc’s mind. It could be a coincidence that the thing appeared shortly after Orc had eaten the blue flakes.
Forget explanations, Jim told himself. Deal with the here and the now. Find a way to fight this unseen, handless, and faceless entity. Jim wondered how he could warn Orc about it? After a while, he realized that he could not. The battle, if there was to be a battle, was going to be between himself and the thing.
Since he was tired of just calling it a thing, he decided that he would name it. Everything had to have a name, a label. What could it be?
“Ghostbrain” came to him. As good a name as any. Ghostbrain it was.
Five days after arriving at the sea, Orc was hunting for fresh meat. After three hours, he glimpsed one of the forest-dwelling antelopes and began stalking it. An arrow was fitted to his bow, ready to leap forth and plunge into the brown-and-black dappled side of the cervine. Something spooked it before he could get within range. It leaped away, dodging around tall bushes and jumping over the shorter ones.
Cursing silently, he approached the area where it had been. He was cautious. Whatever had frightened it might be a large and dangerous beast. Then, peering through a bush, he saw the cause of the deer’s alarm. It was about the size and shape of a skunk, its big bushy black tail waving. It was digging into the ground with its shovel-shaped and long-clawed paws. The food it sought was buried only an inch or two in the ground. It did not take long for the beast to uncover and to start eating it.
Orc would have been disgusted under different circumstances. The loathsome creature mostly ate carrion and excrement and anything edible that was dead or near-dead. This time, Orc was too astounded to feel repulsion. The meal the beast had unearthed was a pile of feces, which he had expected. What he had not expected was fresh human feces.
He was not the only person on this planet.
He whirled, scanning the woods behind him. His heart was beating hard, not because of joy but because that other person might be stalking him.
He glimpsed a dark face and a stone spearhead dropping behind a bush.
He got on the other side of the bush and looked intently all around him. The dark man could have companions. When he was fairly certain that there were none, he called out, “I am Orc, son of Los and Enitharmon! I am alone! There is no need for us to try to kill each other! I am looking for the gate out of this world! I have no quarrel with anyone but my father! Let us make peace! Each of us has a better chance of finding the gate if we pool our brains and resources!”
He waited. There was no response, and he was sure that the dark man had left the bush the moment he knew that he had been observed.
The World of Tiers Volume Two: Behind the Walls of Terra, the Lavalite World, Red Orc's Rage, and More Than Fire Page 55
