by Forbes West
~~~~
YOU stand outside the Benbow Inn, at the lobby floor of Mission Friendship. You wait around, trying to see if anyone is around or working at this place. The doors are closed.
You suddenly feel weird, dejected, alone, hopeless, all of those feelings put together into a hideous emotional cocktail. You finally see Treena and Winniefreddie Page, the Page sisters, open the place up.
You walk inside.
The Benbow Inn is apparently nothing but four walls and an incredibly small version of the Nemo Gate that girds the Pacific. Treena and Winniefreddie have disappeared, apparently having gone through the Gate itself back to, well, wherever they have just gone to. A neatly printed sign hangs from a cardboard cut-out of John Wayne. Step on in, Pilgrim! One second away from cold beer and fun!
You hold onto the side of the Gate, girding yourself but then giving up.
You let go of the side of the Gate and feel this sort of pull as you go through the middle. There is a thunder crack and you can see, for just a brief moment in time, everything at once—your past, the present predicament, scenes of the future, all in a flash, in a jumbled mash that you can barely remember after being pulled through the Gate. Then you see a thousand stars exploding and have the sense of watching a white ring of light form and grow…
You are on the other side of the Nemo Gate, which is next to a pair of heavy wooden doors inside the actual inn. Looking through the massive plate glass windows at the front of the inn, you watch as a light rain pours steadily down onto a turtle and duck pond, scattering the little animals around. Green grass-covered hills covered by the night are just a moment’s walk from the porch area of the Benbow.
You also spot Mission Friendship’s modernistic tower miles away. A large sign bolted to the front doors of the Benbow states: No Access Beyond This Point For Any Network Settlers Past 10:00pm.
The Inn is deserted, despite it being 10:30pm. The wooden booths are empty, the tables with red checkered picnic tablecloths are empty.
The front bar area of the Benbow is decorated at one end with the giant skull of what you find out is a Baleen dragon (“quite harmless if a bit large in real life,” Treena explains later), and hundreds of framed photos from around the world fill every nook and cranny of the place. The ceiling is decorated as if were the night sky, with the seven moons. Dark but homey, the place has that rich smell of years of spilled beer. It also smells of eggs—there is a large clear glass jar of deviled eggs sitting in the middle of the bar, reminding you of a place in Long Beach your dad once took you to. A plaque that states: ILLEGAL TO HAVE ALCOHOL WITHOUT A PERSONAL LIQUOR LICENSE—WITCH-LORD LAW hangs above the bar area.
An apron wearing Ni-Perchta male with one side of his face heavily scarred watches you from down a hall that leads to a true, old school Viking dining hall area. An open fire pit area covered in hot coals is in there, with large bits of meat being grilled under a partially-opened roof. You realize that the bar section must jut out a little bit from Mission Friendship itself.
You yell out to Treena and Winniefreddie, the Page sisters, who are stalking about the place.
“Hey! Hello!” you say.
Treena and Winniefreddie, who seem to want to ignore you, walk over slowly and meet you by the bar. “Hey there, yourself, girl. What’s up?” Winniefreddie says, looking bubbly. “Good to see you, Sarah, right?”
You nod. “Need something to eat and drink. You guys are open, right?” you say, friendly. “How much for a beer and uh, you guys got something heavy? Burgers? Steak? Somethin’?”
“Oh of course. For a price,” Treena, the skinny one with horn-rimmed glasses, says, walking around the counter. She creeps you out at first with her weird voice that sounds like Bullwinkle being castrated by hot oil. “500 Dii-Yaa.” She bats her eyes four times in quick succession, fluttering them at you behind her glasses. Her voice returns to normal. “Please. Sorry, I get excited talking about money.”
You look the star-painted ceiling. “That’s, that’s, um, well it’s 14 Dii-Yaa to the dollar, so that’s, um…” You look at Treena. “It’s 35 bucks. You really get so much business here?”
Treena and Winniefreddie look at each other. Winniefreddie speaks up, “Well, well yes, yes we do. Yes we do. Yes.”
The Ni-Perchta who is in the other room comes walking over, waving his hands. “You pay? Is Exeurncalles! Is Exeurncalles!”
“Yeah, yeah I understand, but I have to pay.”
“Is Exeurncalles!” the Ni-Perchta says, looking at Winniefreddie and Treena.
You start peeling off and giving away the red Monopoly money bills Dee paid you. You give the money to Treena, who looks all too happy to grab it. “Yeah, yeah, shut up, ya stupid alien,” you say as you hand over the cash. The Ni-Perchta still yells in the background. Treena nods appreciatively and stuffs the Dii-Yaa away into her 1950s-era cash register.
You shake your head. “Freakin’ alien, huh?”
Treena and Winniefreddie look annoyed at what you just said. You watch as the Ni-Perchta man leaves and goes back to his cooking.
“You girls into drinking? No one else here, and I don’t want to be the lonely drunk,” you say dejectedly, feeling sickened by the last couple of days.
Treena and Winniefreddie look at each other, shrug. Winniefreddie says “I always love shooting the shit with a new resident.”
The Ni-Perchta male working in the other room yells out, “Is Exeurncalles! Okay!”
You give him the finger, and he ignores you. “What does ‘exeurncalles’ mean to you guys?”
Treena and Winniefreddie smile to each other. “Means you should, uh, show respect to the festival days. Ni-Perchta have rules against drinking. Forget Tek though, he’s just a little pious, that’s all. Forgive him.” Winniefreddie says.
“Beers on us. You are our only customer,” Treena says, walking behind the counter. “I’m supposed to inform you that you need to have a personal liquor license registered with the Mission Manager. Do you have a liquor license?”
“I- uh, yes, not on me,” you say, meeting Treena and Winniefreddie’s eyes.
“The hell with the Ephors,” Treena says. “Fourteenth century fools trying to boss us around. If it wasn’t for the ori we’d probably never come here except for a curious vacation.”
~~~~
“HE cheats on you with two different people, and then has the balls to blame you for not doing the ‘hey-hey’?” Winniefreddie is saying, making a mock shivering motion. She is sitting on one of the bar stools, her chubby figure angling to get a comfortable perch. The storm has picked up and is still playing outside. “Is he a psycho?” Winniefreddie continues, as you stand behind the bar drinking out of a copper cup you just refilled with the tap.
Treena, the skinny one with horn-rimmed glasses, is on another cracked red leather stool next to Winniefreddie playing solitaire. Treena looks annoyed, since you’ve been belaboring the shit out of this story, and pipes in with her opinion. “Yeah, he sucks and needs to die in a car fire. Now, can we move the hell on?”
The giant dragon head that hangs over the restroom doors watches you and the others with glass eyes that reflect flickers of light from the fireplace you just lit up angrily after complaining to the Page sisters. You find that you like them a lot and enjoy talking to them.
A regular rainstorm is going on outside. It is at a steady, hard tempo. With only a few lights on and with the centered fireplace-stove giving off light from burning logs, the place is both grim and homey at once. A fully decorated Christmas tree is in one corner. You wonder how they got away with the tree. Perhaps since Christmas is such a secularized nothing holiday back home that even the non-religious love it, you figure that Christmas trees got a free pass.
You notice for the first time that dollar bills are stapled across the ceiling; people have signed them from wherever they came. A couple of the bills are noticeably red notes instead of green dollar bills—Dii-Yaa money. One says Guy Farson, you think. You realize
you’ve been staring at it for a while. If it wasn’t for the Nemo Gate next to the back door of the Benbow, you would think you were in some ancient pub back on Earth.
“T-that was my feeling, yes, Treena, but then what you were saying… And yeah, he’s, wow,” you say, turning on the beer tap and putting your mouth on the end. “God, I like to drink now.”
You are joking but there is a bit of reality behind your statement. Alcohol, you notice, makes things feel just distant enough that you can think for a simple moment. Alcohol calms your nerves and your stomach enough to make life tolerable. Alcohol masks the shittiness you feel. With increasing doses, alcohol makes life fun again. You have noticed this since the Queen Mary. Guy offered you a drink then and you remember how your mind stops racing, slows down and you think you can think more clearly after a drink.
Winniefreddie wiggles some more and then takes out a cigarette. She mumbles something under her breath and then looks through her pockets for a lighter, doesn’t find one, and puts the cigarette away.
You stop. “Did you just say he’s a probably a vampire? I don’t think this- Wait, are there vampires here, in The Oberon? You think? No, no that’s stupid… Wait, there are vampires here…” You think of the dead city you went through.
Winniefreddie looks away and mumbles something about you about to be educated, so you move on.
Treena takes out a small .38 pistol and a blue expandable baton that’s collapsed. It has a single blue orichalcum stone in the handle. She lays it out on the counter. “You should go back there and blow his brains out. This is my gun and my baton, totally untraceable to you. You understand me? Totally untraceable.”
Winniefreddie quietly asks, “Can we have a beer to calm our nerves?”
You nod and bring out copper cup for each as well as two bottles of home-made beer with tags stating Tokyo Sexy Whale. You realize that you are just running the bar now, for no particular reason. Treena takes the beer bottle without looking and twists off the cap. You look at the bottle again. The name is awfully familiar. You stare at the label that shows a blue whale with a sailor’s cap on. The whale is destroying what could be downtown Tokyo, while women in bikinis run away from the whale. Tokyo Sexy Whale is written in colorful, neon lettering.
Winniefreddie is trying to open her bottle with her teeth until she sees Treena make a twisting motion with her hands. “Look at me, Winniefreddie, look at me.” Treena says.
“Where you guys, I mean, let me say that again. Where you guys from?” you slur.
“Seal Beach, originally,” Winniefreddie says. “Graduated Los Alamitos High School in 2006.”
You lick your lips. “You gotta be shitting me! You shit me not! God, that’s me too, me freakin’ too! I graduated in 2011! Jeez, that’s awesome! We are all from Seal Beach!” You are very happy to hear that and high five the two girls, hard. “This is fate. I attracted this. I attracted this big time. You ever read The Secret?”
They shake their heads.
“What are you guys doing out here?” you ask.
“Selling alcohol pretty much. We make our own beer. Tokyo Sexy Whale. Want to get out there to the Sargasso-3 Free Zone. California Gold Rush time, you know? Sargasso-3 is supposed to be barely hit, and so a lot of flush dayhawks are paying ten bucks a beer. You can’t import alcohol into The Oberon, but we can make it here,” Treena says, her face down.
You look at the bottle again. “Tokyo Sexy Whale. That’s—you know Guy Farson, don't you? Dayhawker, right?”
Treena and Winniefreddie become very still. “Nope, never, uh, heard of him. Why do you say that?” Treena says.
You look at the bottle again, thinking, but don’t say anything.
“We really wanted to get into dayhawking ourselves, but we don’t have anyone to teach us, you know? And the license cost- If you want to do it legally and in the daytime, it's a lot of money or special favors to the Bureau agent here,” Winniefreddie says. Treena looks at her as if she has said too much and Winniefreddie quiets down.
“I want to do that. We are all California girls. We can handle ourselves out there in the big bad empty, can’t we?” you say.
Winniefreddie is nodding along and saying, “Hell yeah. Hell yeah,” repeatedly. You put out your sloshing cup full of cold beer. “Here’s to underage drinking and bad decision making! We got to go into dayhawking, right? I mean you guys don’t want to just own this place, right? I mean you guys got here just a little while ago too, right?”
Treena and Winniefreddie look at each other. “Right, right, and we own this place, right.”
The Ni-Perchta male walks behind you three, shaking his head and yelling, “Is Exeurncalles!”
You shoo him away. “Shoo! Shooooo!” Winniefreddie and Treena say goodnight to the Ni-Perchta male, who goes into a back room area that is marked Private. You see a little cot is set up for him to sleep on.
“Do you guys want to see something nuts? The book? That the Network Rep brought me back in Long Beach? From my sister. I looked it up online. It's a very rare thing to have, and it’s supposed to be very helpful with dayhawking,” you say.
Treena shrugs. Winniefreddie nods with excitement.
You put down the copper cup and run back to your apartment—which means going through the Nemo Gate again with a crack. You bring out the book, and slap it down on the counter in the Benbow. You open it up.
Winniefreddie looks like she’s just won the lottery. “Oh snap, it’s the Necronomicon! Have the walls started to bleed and are the stars right? Where’s the section where we can raise the dead from their dreamless sleep?”
You ignore Winniefreddie’s ramblings on H.P. Lovecraft, excited about telling your story. “Voice of the Four Winds or something, he said. Not the Necronomicon. I don’t know what that is. You can read stories, look over maps- I’ve read a lot in here.” Treena finally rouses herself up, pushes back her glasses, and looks over the book.
“Are you thinking about selling it? It has to be worth something…” Treena says.
“Y-yeah,” you say, meaning it but feeling that it will never happen. Looking at the book again gives you a chill. It’s quiet for a long moment with the logs crackling in the background and the storm playing outside the front doors.
“These books are pretty rare, Sarah, so I’ve heard,” Treena says.
“These books, these are really strong religious artifacts too. Like our Bibles or Korans. Sort of a translator/GPS/gospel for the natives, the Ni-Perchta. How’d your sister get it?” Treena flips through the pages of the book. “And it is blank, Sarah.”
“And it’s worth a shitload of money, I think, wait, what?”
Treena nods without looking up from the pages. “Oh yeah. You smell that, every time you flip a page? Smells like electrical burn. Just, sort of, drifts up from the page. What is this?”
Winniefreddie spits out half of her beer, spraying the book and you, understanding what you have and what can be done with it. “Oh man, we can use this! I know what this is. This is a tetrachromatic version of their book—that’s why we can’t see it—but I guess you can, jeez. Man, we make money so we can hang out with you and you’ll be like, ‘Winniefreddie, you want to go places and do things and not work ’n’ shit?’ And we can drink Hankakins instead of Budweisers, and the men we hang with will all look like Abercrombie and Bitch models except without the douche factor? Right?” She high fives you hard and you are barely ready. You shake your hand because it hurts. “But wait, you said you can read certain things, how does that work?”
You wipe your front with a towel after spilling some beer on yourself. “Sounds a-awesome to me, too. The word is Heineken. Not Hankakins.” You look at the book. You can see every hieroglyphic and a map showing the entire Oberon with the four regions—Burzee, Quadling, Super Sargasso Sea, and Nikh-Cunm/Former COMECON Territories.
“Do I look like I’m Russian like Hitler? I don’t speak the language,” Winniefreddie says, chugging her beer and placing it on the counter.
“Chalk up another one to the Maniac. I can’t read a thing though. You must be tetrachromatic.”
Winniefreddie and Treena look at each for a long moment. “Yeah, you must be.” Treena agrees. “You know what that is, right?”
“Seeing extra colors and shit,” you slur.
“Seeing extra colors beyond the normal spectrum, right,” Treena says.
“Cool.” You start to gargle with beer and dribble some onto yourself. “My future is in beer dentistry… Hey, hey, got a question. Why are we so locked up tight in the Mission? They afraid of the Ni-Perchta that much? I mean, Jesus, what’s the big deal? They are strange but they ain’t, you know, Cthulhu flying up into your face and shit, you know?”
Winniefreddie and Treena smile at each other. “There’s a lot of, creatures, around. I mean, more like in Sargasso-3, but still, you can see things out there, late at night.” Treena says.
You nod as if you really understand this. “Where is everybody?”
The Page sisters shrug. “It’s Christmas Eve. Everyone is with family, Sarah.” Winniefreddie says.
Treena comes up with an idea. “We should go to the Breaks, girls! Hang out at the bars on Moondog Street!”
You high five her hard, making her cringe. Winniefreddie nods her head. “Oh yeah.”
~~~~
YOU and the girls actually walk the green and hilly fields at night, taking a good fifteen to twenty minutes to get over to the walled village of the Funeral Breaks. Walking on a cobblestone path, you and the girls are doing a stumble-and-talk to the town’s edge. The high wooden and stone walls greet you with ambivalence and the gate leading inside has a green reflector plate, like a highway sign back home, stating that the walled village of the Funeral Breaks is a designated census spot. A mix of cars and motorcycles and even a few short buses are all over, parked in front of the village, each modified with extra lights, metal plates, and other things to armor them.
A single yellow Karmann Ghia stands out amongst all of the other cars—clean looking, snub-nosed, a 1970s hipster-mobile. A Ni-Perchta kid, maybe thirteen, sits on the hood of a ’55 Chevrolet that's dying of rust, smoking a Valis pipe. He waves to you and points to his pipe. You ignore him. A slight drizzle falls from an overcast sky, creating a mist.
