The darkness presses against the soft, barely-there bars of blue illumination. Still, though, you might just see large cylinders marching in line with the light, stretching up past your head, the small refracted glow of the blue detailing them, giving them dimension. Rectangular boxes are attached to the cylinders at head-height. You don’t know what the boxes are for, or what the vast cylinders might contain (you think of a giant’s test tubes in some mammoth laboratory, and you wouldn’t be very far off with that).
You stop and peer closer, squint your eyes. Just above of the rectangular box, centered in a cylinder, you see a crack, barely limned by the soft blue illumination. It reminds you of a lightning-struck tree.
You stand there and try to get more information, but the darkness stops you. You might look to the next cylinder further down the aisle and discover that it’s . . . gone. The box stands freely.
In a room full of mystery, there is still another.
*****
The World
His name was Tommy Adamson now and whiskey wasn’t waking him up. The music from the jukebox—scratchy C&W—pressed him down against the bar like a physical thing. Stepping through the Sideways Door always left him physically drained. It was the one constant of existence.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the serrated triangle. Its black surface absorbed the soft rainbow light of the beer signs. It looked like an oversized shark’s tooth. Thumb rubbing the tooth’s surface, his heart took on weight.
He shook his head and re-pocketed it. He knocked back the last of the whiskey, grimaced, then held the tumbler up.
The bartender, a big daddy with a gut the width of Tommy’s entire torso, stood against the backbar, swabbing out glasses with a white towel and watching the players at the pool table. He saw Tommy, tossed the towel onto his shoulder, and made his way over. “You sure you wanna ‘nother? You look way the hell gone already.”
Tommy scrubbed his face with his hands. “I am not drunk, just exhausted.” He paused, searching for the right term through the tired jumble in his mind. “I thought whiskey would put a little gasoline in my engine.”
“Then you know shit about alcohol, buddy.” The bartender reached beneath and pulled a taller glass, set it down on the bar, and added a finger of whiskey. He exchanged the whiskey for a soda gun, filled the rest. “This might give ya more of a pick-me-up. After that, coffee. I don’t need no one conking out on my bar. Don’t look right.”
“Thank you,” Tommy said. He sipped and carbonation stung his lips. The sugar was good.
“Hey,” a man said to his left. He turned to see an older fellow, his wrinkled face awash with two-day’s white stubble.
“Yes?” Tommy said.
“Yer hair’s all diff’rent colors,” the man said.
Tommy’s hand went to his shaved head, felt the bristles, knowing the texture wouldn’t tell him anything, but it didn’t matter because he knew what the man was talking about: he’d forgotten to shift, to take on a single “type” when he’d stepped into this timeline.
A useless thought entered his head: I am Tommy Adamson, and I belong in this bar. I am Tommy Adamson, and I belong—
“I do not know what you mean, sir,” Tommy said, and his mouth was loose, the tongue foreign.
“Yeah ya do,” the man said and turned. “Hey, Mack! Mack, c’mere!”
The bartender walked back over. “Whaddaya want, Stu? I ain’t refilling ya. I just haven’t gone heartless enough to kick yer ass inta the cold.”
Stu waved a hand at him. “Not that.” He pointed at Tommy. “Lookit this man’s head. His hair’s all diff’rent.”
Mack gave Tommy a cursory glance. “Man’s head’s shaved, Stu.”
“But it ain’t clean. Hair’s coming back. Look at it.”
Tommy looked down the length of the bar. A few other patrons glanced his way. He swallowed. He didn’t feel particularly exhausted, anymore.
(I am Tommy Adamson, and I belong—)
Then, “Holy shit.”
Tommy turned, and Mack’s face was scrunched together. “What’s with your hair, pal?”
(I am Tommy Adamson—)
“There’s nothing wrong with my hair, sir.”
“I just see the side of his ’ead,” Stu said, “an’ he’s got blond and brown and red all mixed up there.”
The bartender scrutinized Tommy, a harder study than just seeing if a customer was drunk. This was the gaze of a man trying to make sense of something he’d never seen before.
“Wait,” Mack said, softly. “Are you a nigger, boy? One of them half-breed niggers that can pass for white?”
“A nigger?” Stu cried. “I thought he was one of them migrants Old Man MacGregor’s got on his farm.”
“Y’all both cracked!” one of the other patrons called. “He’s as white as you both are. Jesus, is blindness catching?”
Tommy swallowed again. He lowered his eyes, knowing it was too late to blend his hair, his skin, but not wanting anyone to look into his eyes, knowing they weren’t colorfast, either. “Gentlemen, I am—”
Someone cried out, “Jeezus Chris’, what’s that stench?”
It came to Tommy, Mack, and Stu an instant later—that heady brew of corruption and cleaner and ozone, pushing aside the smell of spilled booze and man-stink. Stu recoiled. Mack stumbled against the backbar, holding his towel to his nose and mouth. “Holy God, what—”
Wood splintered like rifle-shots, and all heads snapped towards the corner, where the door marked GENTS hung half-off its hinges, a large crack zipping down the center. The jukebox cut out with a zzzzziiiiipppp of the needle sliding over the record, and the machine went dark. The main room’s overhead lights flared on bright.
“What the hell?” Mack yelled.
In the doorway of the darkened men’s room, the air shimmered. Two fat teardrops of amber blinked into existence. The hum, like an open channel on the radio, clicked on in Tommy’s head, bent, changed pitch, and the not-human voice said:
Tommy scrambled off his stool and lunged for the door, stumbled into the night’s brutal wind, snow hitting his face like thrown spackle. His feet knotted together and he threw a hand out, catching his balance against the hood of a Studebaker. The cold metal burned his palm.
He yanked himself around the car, kicking up wet drifts of snow. Behind him, back in the bar, someone screamed.
The man known as Tommy Adamson ran into the night.
***
Later, he pawed a shaky hand out and opened the Sideways Door. A blast of late spring sunshine and wind sucked him in.
***
Post-plague Europe, Czarist Russia, the founding of the Masai Tribe in Africa, 1940s Chicago—he stepped through a Sideways Door and entered these worlds for a few hours, a few days, a handful of weeks. Sometimes he was able to blend in truly and experience the world—invading with the Normans, bathing in the Nile, skinning a buffalo with a stone blade. For brief periods, the exhaustion of stepping Sideways left him, and he felt the flow of life.
But always, the nothing-smell of everything would come, all sound would narrow into that magnetic hum, and the air would shimmer with the familiar shape of his hunter, his betrayer.
And he would run to another Sideways Door, another time, another place. Exhaustion dug deeper into him, but it couldn’t match the growing heaviness in his chest and mind, the loneliness that stole the colors of the world around him. Existence was beautiful, but you couldn’t see beauty when you had to forever run away from it, hunted by the one thing that you thought would never betray you.
*****
The Center
Now questions come, one after another, until a chain of them weighs you down. Questions like: why is this cylinder gone? Why is that other cylinder cracked? What was in those cylinders to begin with?
You look back the way you’ve come and realize . . . you can’t see the door you entered; it’s just this aisle, artificially created by lights. You
can’t even remember entering the room. You’re just . . . in this room, walking this aisle, perceiving these cylinders for—how long exactly without breathing or a beating heart?
And, the big question, the one from which all the others spring from: what is this room? What is it here for? Who put those cylinders there and—
—but the next question doesn’t come, because the darkness . . . shifts. Not something within the darkness, but the darkness itself, the entire mass of black that blasts your senses to absolutely nothing—it moves.
You are not alone here.
*****
The World
Isaac Protas stumbled out of the Sideways Door and into the alley, nearly losing his footing as his boots transformed into scuffed sneakers. He threw a weary hand out but slipped on some alley-slime, and his feet went out from under him. His ass thudded to the ground, and he leaned back against a brick wall. It was like a pillow against his head.
Just a moment, he thought, his eyes slipping closed. I’m safe for—
“Holy shit,” a male voice said what felt like an instant later, “have you ever seen a homeless Jew?”
Young giggling met this. Feet shuffled—hard soles over concrete.
Isaac kept his eyes closed as his entire body tightened.
“Lucky day, boys,” the voice said again. “Lucky, lucky day.”
A bolt of pure pain seized Isaac’s thigh as someone kicked him. His eyes snapped open, and a gloved fist slammed into the side of his face. The taste of hot pennies filled his mouth.
Blood, he thought wonderingly. I’m tasting my own blood. And then, I am Isaac Protas, and I am human.
Isaac looked up. Three young men loomed over him, clad in leather and torn cotton. One wore a shirt with the legend THE DAMNED written across it. One had a modest mohawk. One had a badly-inked swastika on a narrow bicep.
“This is a white alley, Jew,” Mohawk Boy said. He gestured at the other two. “See? All white and all right.”
“I will—” Isaac tried to say, but his mouth was so much mush. “I will go.”
Mohawk Boy reached into the pocket of his shredded jeans. “No, Jew, you can’t go. Not yet, anyway.” He pulled a switchblade. A click and the slim blade popped out. “You have to be reminded of what you are. A badge, right?” His face hardened. “Hold ‘im.”
They pinned Isaac against the wall. Isaac’s legs kicked uselessly, his head whipping from side to side.
“Jesus, Steve,” Mohawk Boy said, “grab his fucking head, will you?”
“On it.” A forearm pressed against Isaac’s Adam’s apple, knocking Isaac’s skull against the wall hard enough for stars to cascade across his vision.
“That’s right,” Mohawk Boy said, his voice soft and husky. “Hold the kike still. Hold him. Hold—”
He felt the metal tip against his forehead, the wire-thin pain as it cut into his flesh—
—and then the elbow left his throat as if repelled.
“Fuck—what’s that smell?” Steve cried.
The knife left Isaac’s forehead. “The fuck?” Mohawk Boy said.
Isaac went limp as the familiar hum rose in his head. He looked towards the mouth of the alley, where the air shimmered in that familiar squat shape.
The shimmer approached and, as it did, began to take shape, slowly revealing a creature, hairless and the size of a Shetland pony, walking towards them on disproportionate legs; the front dog-like and as thick as Isaac’s thighs, its back legs thin and reverse-positioned like that of a grasshopper, all tipped with black triangular talons that clicked against the scummy alleyway floor. Thousands of tentacles on the underside of its torso swayed like the corded fur of Hungarian sheepdogs. Its head, squat and pear-shaped, turned this way and that, the cilia at the end of its wrinkled snout close to the ground, its eyes, like amber cartoon raindrops, never leaving the four people. Sunlight spread rays across its slimy, maggot-colored back.
Its insectile back legs propelled it forward, launching it into the air. Its front paws hit Mohawk Boy’s shoulders and drove him down. Mohawk Boy screamed as tentacles wrapped around his arms, head, chest, and pulled him into the creature’s torso. Isaac heard many hidden teeth crunch with a wet, meaty sound. Dimly, his hand slid into his pocket and grabbed the black triangle.
Blood burst as the creature pulled the rest of the man into itself, raining onto the alleyway floor, and errant tentacles flattened against the ground, sopping it up. The creature shivered, raised its head and emitted a reedy whistle, its snout-cilia quivering like streamers. The boy with the swastika tattoo turned as if to run, and the creature was on him, repeating the process. One of its back legs mule-kicked Steve, sending him crashing against a dumpster.
A droplet of blood from the thin gouge on his forehead dribbled into his eyebrow, itching, and he was too tired to knuckle it away. His eyes drifted closed. The creature was here—his hunter, his betrayer—and he was too tired to run anymore. There would be no more Sideways Doors. The experience was over.
*****
Its voice pulled him from the darkness:
He smelled the rich textures of soil.
An autumnal breeze rustled the back of his arms, his neck, teased the bristles of his head.
And the human—once Brad Pfeiffer and Tommy Adamson and Isaac Protas and dozens of others—opened his eyes to stare at the blades of grass in front of him.
They sat at the top of a soft hill, in the center of a massive glade. Far towards the horizon, a late-afternoon sun blazed orange over sooty mountains.
I have been here before, he thought, sitting up. He wore slacks, a silken blouse, and an unbuttoned vest.
the creature said.
(sleeping/coma/dead)
—mind and I knew it to be safe from—
(others/your kind/food)
—so I brought you here.>
The creature sat beside him, its grasshopper-like backlegs drawn up past its button-like ears. Its cilia-snout moved languidly, tasting the air.
Why not return me? the human thought. Is that not why you came? To take me back?
The creature considered him, its amber teardrop-eyes flickering like candlelight. The human saw a scar, like a lightning-struck tree, on its head.
“Am I not?” he asked aloud. His voice sounded odd—not deep, not high, not nasally, not throaty, but some strange mixture of all.
“Is there a difference?”
When was the last time you glimpsed the—
(custodians/gods/creators)
—?>
It wrinkled its snout, and the cilia rubbed together.
the creature said, lowering its head and highlighting the scar,
The human looked at the creature, and the creature shuffled closer to him.
*****
The Center
The darkness moves around you, and a curious thought comes—this room isn’t really dark; your senses just can’t handle anything but the dark. The darkness is protecting you. If the darkness lifted, and you saw—
(everything)
(the possible and impossible)
(where all that is known and unknown can be learned)
—all this room contained . . .
But now whatever the darkness truly is has become aware of you, and it circles. Your eyes fly back to the two cylinders, the only anchor you have in this world.
A hum arises, deep within the center of your ears; the darkness whisperi
ng to you.
(do you wish to understand?)
You realize that it’s whispering in your voice—
(then we will show you one wonder, plucked from the human experience)
—explaining to you that—
***
—the cat was a stray but not a successful one. When you and your future wife stepped onto the porch and it clawed up her torso to get away from the husky tomcat intent on beating its ass, you knew this wasn’t a regular alleycat. It was gray, with a white underbelly, short-haired. Its tail had been broken at the base and healed badly. Its one back paw had been mangled. It was missing teeth. You scared off the angry tom, and the stray dashed off into the night.
The next night, the cat showed up on your back porch, and when you opened the door to its yowling, it waltzed right in. You fed it some tuna, and it wandered around until, five or ten minutes later before it wanted out again. You let it go.
This happened the next night, too. You weren’t friends yet. Friendship doesn’t happen deliberately, although deliberate actions are needed. One drop of water doesn’t equal rain, and one act of deliberate kindness does not equal friendship. They have to add up, become more, building until they are a flood.
On the third morning, you were pouring a cup of coffee when the cat landed on the outside windowsill, yowling to be let in. But you couldn’t, not when you had work to get to.
The cat did not show up that night.
When the cat did show up the fourth night, you didn’t let it back out. It pawed at the door for a moment, then wandered over to sit by you. If cats could have expressions, this cat did: So, this is it, then?
You named it Bender. You took it to the vet, where they told you it was a fixed male with a chip in his shoulder blades. You were heartened when the vet told you it was an incredibly old chip—the last one of that model hadn’t been planted in eight years—and heartened more when, upon tracking down the original owners, were told they didn’t want him.
Fuck them, you said to Bender.
Bender became your cat. For the next nine years, Bender became your companion. He followed you everywhere, slept on you and beside you. As you got married and had children and moved around, Bender was there, staring at you with that same expression: So, this is it, then? You went away on trips and vacations, and he would be somewhere near, waiting, fucked-up tail curled around him.
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