by Steven Novak
Chris sighed, staring blankly into the distance while remembering Ricky’s greasy little face and those pants with the holes in the knees he was always wearing. Surprisingly, despite the onslaught of awful memories, he smiled. Tommy was a lot like he’d been at that age. He thought too much. Sometimes he felt too much for his own good.
There are certainly positives to being blissfully unaware.
Wedging his hand beneath Tommy’s chin, Chris lifted the boy’s face so he could look him in the eye.
A puddle of sweat had formed on his forehead and was now leaking down the sides of his face like splatters of rainwater against a pain of glass. “You know none of this matters, right, kiddo?”
Tommy’s eyes remained downcast, his features slippery with perspiration.
“You’ve got a long life ahead, and the years are going to throw an awful lot at you. I guarantee the day will come when all of this…stuff…when none of it means a thing. Believe it or not, it’ll even seem a little silly.”
Though young Tommy Jarvis could clearly hear his father’s words, he didn’t believe a single one of them. He couldn’t and he wouldn’t, not yet, anyway.
Words are weird that way. They can mean entirely different things at various points in life. While some might claim their meanings are unchanging constants, those some would be wrong. Words adapt and evolve like all things in the universe, even eight-year old boys.
“Come on. It’s time to come inside.” Lovingly squeezing his son’s shoulder, Chris began pulling him in toward the door in which he was currently wedged. “Your mom will kill me if I walk into the house without you. I’m not asking you to be happy about it. You can hate me if you want. That’s okay. Right now I need you to crawl out of this toaster and come inside. You’ve been out here long enough. It’ll be dark soon. Come on. Do as your father says.”
Though Tommy’s mind wanted to fight for his position and remain exactly where he was, his body relented. It had just about had enough. It was drained and worn, and left to stew in its own juices. It wanted out. After crawling from the beaten shell of Mr. Button’s once proud residence, father and son walked slowly across the yard and into the house through the glass slider in the back. Chris rested his arm on his son’s shoulders the entire way.
Tommy was happy to have it there.
A part of him wished it could stay forever.
*
*
CHAPTER 17
BROTHERS AND SISTERS
*
Pleebo had been following her for hours, but he wasn’t entirely sure why. The female conjurer smacked him on the head, knocked him unconscious, dragged him into her shack and then proceeded to tell him that she’d done it all for his own good. Of course it made no sense – none at all – not a word of it. Everything from her mouth was a riddle wrapped inside another riddle, which was then slathered in a thick, gummy riddle sauce. She was blind, she was more than a little creepy, she made no sense whatsoever, and she stunk like the business end of a Rapscalt Gregalot. Yet, for reasons he was entirely unable to wrap his head around, Pleebo found himself willingly trailing behind through the frozen Ochan forest to a destination unknown. Before they set out, she attempted to heal at least some of his wounds. She wrapped his arms and legs in a coarse cloth that had been dipped in a bluish-green liquid, and within an hour he was feeling noticeably better. He wasn’t healed by any means whatsoever, but he was feeling better.
If she was lying to him, or had wanted to hurt him, why would she have bothered to do even that?
Less then ten feet ahead of him the ancient creature came to a sudden jittery stop. Tilting her wrinkled yellowish head upward, she gazed to the tops of the dead trees with her milky-weird, ultimately useless eyes. Though technically she was incapable of seeing anything at all, it was obvious to Pleebo that this rickety old Ochan was somehow witnessing something he could not. His grandfather had been the elder of the Fillagrou race, and when he died his sister had inherited the powers. Pleebo spent a lifetime becoming accustomed to the odd and the unexplainable. Accepting the fact that this wrinkled old female conjurer could see things to which he wasn’t privy was simply another in the long line of things he simply had to accept as truth. Pleebo watched as a grayish, leathery tongue slowly crept from between the female conjurer’s lips and coiled at the end as if it tasted the chilly-thick air.
The corners of her wrinkled face pulled themselves into something resembling a smile. “We are almost there, my Fillagrou companion.”
Pleebo looked in the direction she was facing and saw nothing of note. Above them was the densely cloud-covered sky and the bent charcoal colored branches of the dead forest. Surrounding them, partially disguised by a thick layer of mist rising nearly five feet from the forest floor, was more of the same: corpse trees and nothing else.
What was this crazy old bag talking about? Almost where? They didn’t seem to be going anywhere. They were nowhere at all and they’d spent all day getting there.
Pleebo’s patience was beginning to wear thin.
Despite the efforts of the mutant Ochan and her wrappings, nearly every part of Pleebo’s body hurt, every muscle remained sore. He was getting tired of walking, tired of the cold and the mist and the bizarre sounds rising up from the frozen ground hidden underneath. The Ochan guards had expertly worked him over. So many bones had been broken, then allowed to improperly heal before being broken again. The fact that he was still upright, let alone managing to follow a dusty old female Ochan for miles, was nothing short of astounding. Leaning forward, Pleebo rested his hands on his knees and attempted to catch his breath. Even breathing was a chore in this world. The air was so thin and so cold. Ocha was proving as unforgiving as those who called it home.
“Pardon me, lady,” Pleebo stated through heavy breaths as he watched the conjurer’s tongue retreat into the confines of her cracked and crusted lips. “Don’t take this the wrong way. I appreciate the fact that you got those soldiers off of my tail, and that you managed to heal up some of my wounds with your magic blue goop. I really do. Don’t go thinking I’m some jerk who doesn’t know how to say thank you or something. It’s just, well…I’m wondering. You know, I’m just wondering where in the world it is we’re going.”
Turning to him with the same confusing grin on her face, the old conjurer lifted her twisted excuse for a walking stick and pointed it to her left. Pleebo immediately followed the knotted piece of wood and glanced in the direction she was pointing. Again he saw nothing.
The frustrated Fillagrou shook his head. “What? I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re pointing at. There’s nothing over there but trees and fog! Trees and fog! Trees and fog! All you have here is trees and fog!”
He was beginning to think the conjurer might be blinder then she was letting on.
Lowering her stick to the frozen ground once again, the female conjurer began shuffling slowly in his direction. “Just because you can not see it does not mean it is not there, my impatient young friend. Your world is simply a matter of perspective. It is the only interpretation of which you are capable. While mine is entirely different, I assure you it is none the less real.”
Pleebo sighed again and rolled his eyes, feeling like he’d heard all of this before a thousand times—because in truth, he had. A very small part of him half expected a simple, straightforward answer instead of another heaping spoonful of mystery stew. How stupid. He should have known better.
The conjurer was now a few feet away, her cracked leather tongue sliding back and forth just behind her lips like a snake coiled in the shadows. “The universe is one half perspective and one half perception. There is nothing else. We each exist in our own little worlds, our own little boxes that are uniquely ours alone. This is the truth so many refuse to accept; this is why they’ll never understand.”
Again Pleebo sighed. He just wanted an answer. His legs were on fire. His chest was heaving, and the conjurer’s double-speak had succeeded marvelously at making the pounding in
his head significantly worse. Reaching up he began rubbing at his temples with his long, boney, half-frozen fingers. He just wanted to go home. He wanted to see his sister, and climb a tree, and watch the Fillagrou suns rise slowly in the distance atop their radiant sea of orange. He wanted to help Walcott. He needed to help Walcott. He owed it to Walcott.
He shouldn’t have left Walcott behind.
“Why so glum, big brother?”
At first Pleebo thought he’d dreamt it. He was stuck in Ocha in the cold and the awful and the terrible. He was far from home and even further from hope. Yet he’d heard his sister’s voice. He heard Zanell.
He figured that he must have dreamed her voice into existence, that is, until he heard it again. “You’re not even going to say hello?”
Lifting his weary head, Pleebo glanced with some confusion in the direction of his sister’s familiar tone. What he saw was quite unexpected. Standing just a few feet away, her lower half disguised among the thick grayish mist, was more than the ghostly voice that existed only within the folds of his brain. Standing just a few feet away was his sister. It was Zanell. She was made of flesh and blood, and bone and history, and she was actually there. She was real.
A hopeful smile instantly stretched across his beaten face. “Zanell?”
Deliberately moving through the fog, Zanell quickly closed the distance between herself and her brother, wrapped her arms around his torso and pulled him close. Feeling the warmth of his body against hers, she buried her head into the broken bones of his shoulder and breathed deeply. The fact that she’d witnessed this moment a million times in her head already in no way lessened the torrent of emotions she was feeling. It was good to see her brother. It felt good to touch him and feel that he was alive and relatively well. It was good to hold him in her arms. As her fingers moved across the cacophony of scars the Ochan interrogators had etched into his back, she very nearly broke down.
Pushing her away for a moment, Pleebo held his sister at a distance and gazed into her eyes. As a single watery tear rolled from one of the massive glassy orbs. He reached up with one finger and wiped it away with a reassuring smile.
“You look awful, big brother.” Zanell stuttered with a chuckle.
“Maybe. But you should see the other guys.”
*
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CHAPTER 18
THE HUNDREDTH WORLD
*
With their whisper-thin arms linking them together like the most fragile of chains, the mother Huerzo Snub, Lenore Guzarea, hurriedly led her three children through the crowd of enraged New Tipoloo citizens continuing to pack the already stuffed streets. Word of Zanell’s disappearance had spread quickly and was not well received. She had left them. Without an explanation of any kind, or even so much as a simple goodbye, Zanell had abandoned her followers. When they needed her the most she was nowhere to be found. The confusion felt by the citizens of New Tipoloo and loyal followers of the elders almost instantly turned into betrayal. As expected, the betrayal transformed to anger. Like wildfire and all things dangerous when uncontrolled, anger has the remarkable ability to spread, and spread quickly—which is exactly what happened. The whispers of one creature turned into the screams of another. In no time at all there was such an uncontrolled, undirected madness engulfing the city that Lenore feared there would be no coming back. Not now, not after so much had happened—and maybe never again.
Feeling her children dragging behind, Lenore turned her head and spotted her youngest struggling to remain airborne with his fragile, only partially grown wings. “Hold tight to your brother, Nigel! Don’t you dare let go! Do you hear me? Don’t let go!”
Terrified, the littlest of the three children could only grunt a response as a massive screaming creature covered in thick braids of greenish fur slammed into his little body, nearly flinging him to the dirt.
Lenore knew she needed to keep her clan close and keep them moving as a group. The mass of creatures had swelled to gargantuan proportions and there was little space to maneuver. If the children had been able to properly take to the sky they could have flown above the masses unobstructed. This, unfortunately, was not the case. It would be years yet before even her oldest could hover anywhere above ten feet for more than a few minutes, and little Nigel could barely manage four. She needed to keep the family connected and she needed to keep them close. If she were to lose even one of them, there was a very real possibility that they might be lost forever.
As the final link in the family chain, little Nigel tightened his grip on his older brother’s hand, grit his gums, and willed his aching wings to continue fluttering. He was scared, more scared than he’d ever been in his young life, and he’d lived a very scary life. He wanted to go back to the family’s modest little dwelling and munch away on a bowl of Fluto Root with his brothers. He wanted to cuddle in the crook of his mother’s arm and listen to her stories about the old world and about the place they had lived before the green monsters came and brought their noise and their death. He wanted the sounds to go away. He was sick of the sounds.
Passing through the legs of a nearly eleven foot tall insect-looking species of which even Lenore was unfamiliar, the mother Huerzo spotted the doorway to their dwelling fifty or so feet down the corridor. If she could just get her children inside and away from the swelling madness they would be safe, at least for a little while. Zanell’s disappearance changed everything in an instant. Many of the creatures calling New Tipoloo home relied on her for everything. In some ways she’d become a crutch. With the crutch removed they were left wobbly and uneven, on the brink of toppling over. There was no telling what might happen next, and it was this unpredictability that scared Lenore the most.
Suddenly the weight of her little train seemed far heavier than a moment prior. Glancing over what passed for her shoulder, Lenore noticed that little Nigel was lying on his stomach in the dirt. His breath was ragged and his face covered in brownish clumps of dusty soil. Too tired to move his wings, the tiny appendages pumped hopefully one last time before folding and retreating into the black and red encasing of his back. The foot of a massive Ricardian nearly squashed his little body as it plodded by, too busy to pay an ounce of attention to what was happening on the ground below.
“Stewart, Tanner! Grab your brother! Do it quickly!” Lenore screamed as loud as she could muster over the wild ruckus.
The two older children rushed to the aid of their brother and between them managed to hoist his tiny body into the air. As Huerzo Snubs are not exactly known for their impressive upper body strength, this was a remarkable feat indeed. Though Lenore was impressed and quite proud of her sons, she understood all too well that there was no time for congratulations. The family dwelling was still forty feet away. They had to keep moving. Hovering over her children, Lenore spread her body across the top of them as well as she could in a powerful act of protective desperation. Though larger than any of her offspring, Lenore was noticeably small and remarkably fragile compared to most of the creatures surrounding them.
A single misstep on her part and the entire group would be crushed.
An almost permanent wall of dirt kicked up by the anxious feet of New Tipoloo’s citizens was clogging Lenore’s field of vision and making it difficult to tell exactly where they were and where they were headed. A slimy-thick, purple-skinned leg suddenly emerged from the dusty cloud. Unable to maneuver her children from its path, the beefy appendage slammed into Lenore’s back, spun her around, and tossed the group of discombobulated Huerzo Snubs three feet backward before slamming the lot of them into the hand-carved grooves of a nearby wall.
Wincing, Lenore instinctively wrapped her stubby arms around her children and pulled them close. “Are you okay? Is anyone hurt? Tell me if you’re hurt! Nigel! Stewart! Answer me!”
One by one the boys shook their heads and indicated they were indeed unharmed, though Stewart was covered in a mound of dirt and seemed to be rubbing a sizable lump just above his right eye.
&nb
sp; Lenore could no longer tell where they were. The crowd and the fog were far too thick. In order to get her bearings she would have to take to the air, to get above the heads of the frenzied mob and the billowing dirt. Unfortunately, accomplishing this would mean leaving her children unprotected. It simply wasn’t an option. Under her breath Lenore cursed Zanell for abandoning them. She cursed each and every citizen of the normally peaceful city of New Tipoloo. She could scarcely believe these were her friends, her family. They were acting like children, letting their emotions get the best of them. They were allowing confusion to have its way. It was stupid. They were stupid. She was ashamed. She was ashamed of them all, and ashamed of Zanell, and ashamed that she’d ever believed.
Unexpectedly the wild chatter of the crowd began to dwindle. Their frenzied feet stopped their shuffling, and the dirty haze settled. A single voice emerged from the madness. Distant at first, very rapidly it transformed into something more recognizable and understandable. With her children pulled tightly against her chest and her arms wrapped around them, Lenore stared in the direction of this new voice.
Though she was unable to see the speaker through the mass of bodies, their words were clearly important enough to garner the attention of the previously enraged citizens.
“We have to do something! We can’t just sit back and let this happen!”
A response immediately came from somewhere else among the masses. “What about the elder? What about the prophecy?”
Lenore wiped a mound of dirt from her face and tried her best to peer through the crowd. They were too tightly packed. She could only listen.
“Zanell’s gone! We can’t change that. We can’t count on her anymore. Maybe we never could! I don’t know about any of you, but I’m not willing to sit here and let them have their way with another world! I refuse to let this happen again!”
