I gave him no time at all.
I launched myself at him. I did not fight him like a human. I fought him like a cat, with clawed hands and sharp teeth, going for the vulnerable spots, the soft underbelly, the throat.
He tried to push me away. He could not. He had no defense against frenzy, and I did not give him one.
I destroyed him, the way he destroyed the old black tom, the way he had tried to destroy the black-and-orange, the way he had destroyed the woman who had lived in this house.
I destroyed him, and when I was done, I studied him for a moment.
I could, I suppose, have called humans to help me with him or what remained of him. They would come, clean the house, take him away, find the woman, and know some of what had happened.
But this house was remote, isolated. It had checks coming in and bills being paid. And he had an identity, one he was leaving behind.
I could clean this place. I could stay here. And I could bring in Others. I knew where they lived, how to tame the feral ones, how to make the lost pampered cats safe. I would leave the broken window alone for those who did not like being confined, and I could find food. Eventually, I could learn enough to survive, only not as a destroyer.
Cats buried excrement all the time. They buried excrement to hide traces of where they were, what they had been. He was excrement. I could put him deep in the ground, so no one would scent him.
No one would look. I would make certain of that.
I continued to study him—or what was left of him. I could carry him, and dig a hole for him. I could clean the walls, and figure out how to live here.
Or I could claim it as part of my territory after the humans had cleaned it out. It would take them a long time to settle the accounts, to figure out what had happened to the woman, to find out who he was.
Besides, I did not like to be confined.
I picked up the phone and dialed 911, but said nothing, leaving the phone off the hook. I knew that would work, because I knew human details, although I did not understand them.
Someone would arrive, take the body away, and remove the smell of death. They might board up the window, but they wouldn’t close all of the crawl spaces. I would find a way in, or my pride would as I continued to form it. We would eat the food of the nice man and we would sleep out of the rain and we would be safe, or as safe as we could be, here at the edge of my territory, in my world.
At the last minute of the twenty-fourth hour, when the catlike creatures came for me, I exercised my last wish. I returned to my old life.
And I did not regret it.
I am old now, older than the old black tom had ever dreamed of being. I am careful about how I make my way to the top of the hill. I know some young tom will try to take my turf from me, and I don’t care as much as I thought I would. I would cede most of it to him, if he asked, so long as he left me the house.
The humans call it the death house. The nice man who still feeds me cautions me to stay away from it, saying no one knows what happened there. I do not tell him I live there now, with other ferals and the occasional refugee for whom I must find a home.
My original Others look healthy and younger every year. They have now moved to the windows, and their eyes have less fear. I have not told them what I did. I do not know how.
But on late summer afternoons, I imagine doing so as I doze in my safe place. I imagine telling the old black tom about my choices during my Bargain.
I like to think he knows what I did.
But he probably does not.
His life ended on that overgrown driveway. Mine will end in the woods nearby. When the time comes, I will leave my house, my territory, and die the way my kind does. Alone, so that no one follows the stench of death.
I like our ways. I understand them.
And while I remember all that I have learned about the humans, I still do not know what it all means.
I’m not sure I want to.
I am simply glad there are the nice ones to balance out the destroyers.
I no longer wish I could be different. I like my life. I like the choices I have made. And I like sleeping here, on my porch, in the hot, hot sun.
INTO THE N TH DIMENSION
David D. Levine
The fence around Dr. Diabolus’s lair is twenty feet tall, electrified and topped with razor wire. I’d expected no less. From one of the many pouches at my belt I pull a pair of acorns and toss them at the base of the fence.
I exert my special power. Each acorn immediately sprouts, roots digging through asphalt as the leafy stem reaches skyward. Wood fibers KRACKLE as the stems extend, lengthen, thicken, green skin changing to grayish bark in a moment. Leaves SSHHH into existence ; branches reach out to the neighbor tree, twining themselves into rungs.
Before the twin oaks have reached their full height I spring into action, clambering up the living ladder as it grows, creeping along a limb even as it extends over the razor wire. It’s a dramatic, foolhardy move, but I can’t delay—Sprout is in peril! The branch sags under my weight, lowering me to within 10 feet of the ground, and I leap down with practiced ease.
Again I concentrate, and the two trees wither away behind me, a gnawed patch of asphalt and a few stray leaves the only sign they’d ever existed. I feel their pain as they wilt and die, but I don’t want my intrusion discovered sooner than necessary. The loss of their green and growing lives is just the latest of the many sacrifices I’ve made. I press onward.
Slippery elm makes short work of the side door lock; mushrooms blind security cameras and heat sensors. These bright corridors, humming with electricity and weirder energies, are cold places of steel and concrete, offering me no plants or plant matter to leverage my powers. I’ve faced worse. I prowl quickly, silently, keeping my head down, all senses alert to any trace of the kidnapped Sprout.
Voices! I duck into an alcove as two of Dr. Diabolus’s goons round the corner. As soon as they’ve passed I spring out behind them, tossing seeds at their feet. Fast-twining English ivy ensnares one before he can cry out, but the other evades its tendrils. “Phyto-Man!” he gasps.
POW! my fist responds. He drops cold beside his still-struggling comrade, whose eyes glare with hatred above his smothered mouth. I direct the ivy to bind the unconscious goon as well, so he’ll raise no alarm when he awakes.
Even their underwear is synthetic fiber. Dr. Diabolus is thorough, I’ll grant him that.
Deeper and deeper into the cavernous lair I probe, keeping an eye on the pipes and conduits that line the ceiling, smaller leading to larger, following the branch to find the trunk. I know Dr. Diabolus; wherever he’s holding my sidekick it will be near his latest contrivance, and all his inventions require massive amounts of power.
If only he’d gone solar instead of stealing plutonium, we might have been allies.
At last I come to a massive, vault-like door, all steel and chrome, set in a concrete wall into which many thick conduits vanish. But nothing is more persistent than a plant. I tuck dozens of tiny dandelion seeds into the crack between door and jamb. Their indomitable roots reach deep, swelling and prying, until with a WHANGG of tearing metal the door bursts from its frame.
With my own muscles I wrench the shattered door aside and burst into the chamber. Dr. Diabolus turns to me, cape swirling. “You disappoint me, Phyto-Man,” he sneers, his artificial eye glowing red. “I expected you here half an hour ago.”
“Traffic was terrible,” I quip. The chamber is dominated by a complex machine, seething with arcane energies that make my head swim, but there’s no sign of Sprout. “What have you done with my sidekick, you fiend?”
“I sent him to . . . the Nth Dimension!” He pulls a lever on the control panel before him. A ten-foot iris of blue steel in the center of the machine SNICKs open, revealing....
Looking into the opening makes my eyes feel like they’re being pulled out of my head. It’s as though all the colors of the palette have somehow been smeared together with . . . oth
ers . . . forming impossible combinations of hue and tone that swirl sickeningly. But worse than that, the weird amalgam of color seems to bend . . . around a corner that isn’t there. It’s painful to see, even harder to look away.
CHANGG! Something hard and cold fastens onto my bicep, breaking the spell. “What?” I cry. Before I can move, a second steel claw CHANGGs onto my other arm. CHANGG! CHANGG! CHANGG! I’m caught like a fly, steel bracelets ringing my arms, legs, and neck. Jointed metal arms haul me off the floor, suspend me in the air before the gloating Dr. Diabolus.
“HAHAHAHAHA!” he laughs as I struggle in vain. “You’ve foiled my plans for the last time, Phyto-Man!”
“If you’ve harmed Sprout—!” I growl through clenched teeth, straining against the imprisoning metal.
“My dear Phyto-Man, I must confess . . . I don’t know!” He works the controls and the arms propel me, none too gently, toward the yawning portal. The uncanny colors swirl crazily, filling my vision, seeming to tug at every fiber of my being. “But whatever has become of your Sprout, you will shortly be joining him there. Bon voyage, Emerald Avenger!”
The arms thrust me forward. With a SPRANK! the five claws open simultaneously, flinging me into the swirling abyss.
A hard, gritty surface presses against my side. I’m cold, my head is spinning, and everything hurts. There’s a thin, rushing sound off in the distance. Traffic?
I sit up and open my eyes. And immediately I wish I hadn’t.
There’s nothing to see but a cracked and filthy concrete floor and my own hands, but they’re all wrong . . . seriously wrong. The floor curves away from me in every direction—the same impossible curvature I’d seen in Dr. Diabolus’s portal—despite the fact that it looks and feels flat. And the surface looks like . . . like concrete multiplied by itself. Cracks are crackier. Grit is grittier. It’s all realer than real; it pounds on my eyes as though I were staring into the sun, though there’s barely any light. And the color is not just gray, but a weird amalgam of thousands of different grays blended smoothly together. A whole shining rainbow of grays.
My heart is pounding. I’ve faced death many times, fought monsters, escaped from traps, but I’ve never experienced anything this disturbing. Always before the threat came from outside, but now it’s me—my own perceptions—that have changed.
My hands, too, are a disconcerting, amplified version of themselves. I turn them before my eyes, and as they rotate I seem to see both sides at the same time as the front. In color they are . . . kind of an ultra-pink, not the plain pink I’ve seen every day of my life but an eye-hurting blend of unnatural shades. Pinks that don’t exist, have never existed. And as I look more closely I see disturbing swirls of texture in my skin, spiraling like microscopic galaxies, like nothing I’ve ever seen before.
I swallow and rip my attention away from my own fingers. Have I been drugged? I shake my head hard, but that just makes the headache and dizziness worse. I pound my fists on the ground, but though I feel the impact and the pain there’s no comforting THUD, just a muffled thump so faint and distant I might as well be imagining it.
“Hello?” I call. No, nothing wrong with my hearing; my voice bounces back to me from the darkness, echoing off the distant, unseen walls.
To my surprise there’s an immediate reply. “Michael ?” The voice is heartbreakingly familiar. I feel a twinge of hope.
“Sprout?” I peer into the darkness, hoping for a glimpse of green tights and pointed shoes. It’s a ridiculous outfit. Why have we never changed it?
And why have I never wondered that before?
“It’s me, Michael. Richard.”
A familiar figure appears in the dim distance, but with everything so strange here I can’t afford to relax. “Is this a secure area? We should stick to code names . . .”
“No need. There’s no Sprout here, and no Phyto-Man either.”
Worries spring up in my mind—impostors, hypnosis, possession, brainwashing—but I decide to bluff it out in case there are unseen observers. “Well, I’m here now, Sprout.”
“This all seems very strange, I know, but don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”
Despite his reassurances, there’s a strangeness about Sprout as he approaches. He’s wearing street clothes, in colors and textures as hallucinogenic as everything else here, and his face combines familiarity with an alien super-reality exactly as my own hands do, but the really disturbing thing is the way he moves. Each step flows into the next with a weird gliding motion that propels him forward seamlessly, without transitions. It’s like he’s rolling toward me on a treadmill, constantly cresting a hill that isn’t there. I push down feelings of nausea and . . . and fear. Never in all my adventures have I faced anything as disquieting as this place. “Where am I?”
“Dr. Diabolus called it the Nth Dimension, but the people here just call it the world.” He’s reached me now, and the mingled concern and relief in his face match the conflicting emotions in my own heart. “I’m so glad you’re finally here.”
He bends down and helps me to my feet, a disturbing reversal, and I find that I move with the same unnatural glide that he does. Even more disturbing, I find I’m naked. “My costume!” I cover myself with my hands as best I can, but the loss of my belt pouches, my carefully nurtured collection of seeds, leaves me feeling not just nude but defenseless.
I reach out with my powers. Perhaps a seed from a discarded Fig Newton lies in a crack on the floor, a seed I can grow into leaves to cover my nakedness. But there’s nothing; my powers are dulled almost to nonexistence. I can feel wood beams supporting the ceiling high above, but I can’t warp them to my will.
I’m helpless. For the first time in . . . I can’t remember when.
“Don’t worry,” Sprout says, “no one here wears costumes. I brought you some clothes.” He turns, the motion revealing sides and back, width and depth and thickness, all at once. I groan and nearly lose my balance. “Oh!” he says. “I’m sorry. Try closing one eye. It helps.”
I do, and it does—the colors are still wrong but the disorienting sense of everything being too far away and too close at the same time is greatly reduced. Sprout—Richard—reaches into a rustling paper bag and hands me a folded bundle.
Putting the clothes on is a challenge. Each trouser leg recedes like a portal to another world; buttons and zippers feel much larger, more detailed than they should. I close my eyes completely and let my instincts take over. It makes a big difference. How many times in my life have I dressed myself? But this still feels like the first time.
I sit on the filthy floor to tie the unfamiliar shoes. “That’s better,” I say. “Now let’s get to work.” Maybe action will still the trembling dread in my heart. “There’s no time to lose—we need to get back to our own dimension and defeat Dr. Diabolus before it’s too late!”
Richard smiles and shakes his head. I’m starting to get used to the weird multi-dimensional effect. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty of time.” He puts out a hand. “Come on. I’ll explain over coffee.”
Sprout’s lack of concern raises anew the questions I’d had about drugs, hypnosis, imposters. But lost in a strange, incomprehensible world, I have no better alternative to offer. I take his hand.
His hand is warm and soft in mine. When was the last time I’d grasped it without gloves, without haste, without danger all around?
He leads me across the floor—now that my eyes have adapted a bit to the darkness and strangeness I see that the space is a cavernous, disused warehouse—to a corroded metal door. It opens with a muted squeak of rusty hinges, not the SKREEK I would have expected, but once we pass through it to the street I’m assaulted by a cacophony of sounds, visions, and smells more intense than New Year’s Eve in Metro City. Cars in an astonishing variety of designs and colors careen by, with the same seamless motion as Sprout’s walk but a hundred times faster. Each one seems to zoom in from the horizon and vanish away to infinity all in a moment, but even as they speed by I c
an’t help but notice their scratches and dents and chips in the paint and a hundred other details. It’s a dizzying kaleidoscope of color and detail.
“Whoa!” I cry out as Sprout hauls me back from the curb.
“Careful, big guy.” He pats my shoulder. “You’re not invulnerable here.”
“Well, I’ve never been in Dynamic Man’s league . . .”
“No, I mean you can really get hurt easily. It doesn’t take much, and it takes a long time to heal. Look at this.” He pulls up his sleeve, revealing a hideous scab on his elbow. “I scraped this on a brick wall when I first got here. Just a little scrape, nothing I’d even have noticed if I were in a fistfight with the Demolisher, but it hurt like a son of a bitch—”
I’ve never heard such language. “Sprout!”
“—and a month later it’s still not all the way better.”
A month? Immediately I’m on high alert again. Has the imposter slipped up? Sprout only disappeared the day before yesterday.
But he notices the change in my expression—faces here seem more subtle, more expressive—and puts up a hand. “Sorry. We’re on a monthly schedule. One or two of our days, more or less, is a month here. I should have told you right away.” His eyes dip to the sidewalk. “There’s a lot I should have told you, before.”
My suspicions are only slightly allayed, but I still have little alternative but to stick with this person, whether or not he’s the Sprout I know. Whoever he is, he just saved my life.
We walk to a coffee shop. Safe from the chaos of the street, I can begin to appreciate the wonder of this world—the colors and textures, the tears in the vinyl seat’s upholstery, the individual grains of spilled sugar on the laminate tabletop. My spoon makes a tiny tinktink noise as I stir my coffee. The flavor is astonishing—rich and sweet and dark. “So you’ve been here a whole month?”
He nods. “I showed up in the same place you did. It’s the closest analog in this world to Dr. Diabolus’s lair. It took me quite a while to figure this place out, but I finally did.”
Human for a Day (9781101552391) Page 21
