Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  But by then it was too late. I was at the basement window.

  It is very important to set one half of your brain to argue with the other half while you are belly-crawling into possible death during what may be your last hour on Earth. You keep it occupied. Otherwise the two lobes will gang up and bring you to your senses and stop you.

  4. The Window

  The basement windows of the Museum were semicircles of thick glass, covered with mesh, and designed to be tilted open no more than a quarter of a right angle, exposing a crack like the toothless grin of a jack-o-lantern turned upside down.

  I heard a soft noise, like the scrape of nails on concrete, come softly through the crack. Something alive was moving in the basement.

  Between each window, some gardener of long ago had decided to make my life easier by planting a bush big enough to duck behind. Duck I did.

  That gardener of long ago had also decided to make my life harder by picking holly as the type of bush to plant. I made a mental note to find out whether one of those gun sportsman magazines that are always lying around my house was called something like BULLETPROOF JACKET LIFE. I resolved to write to the editors to tell them my amazing discovery that a jacket that deflects bullets cannot stop the little poking thorns of nasty Christmastime plants, especially if the jacket is too small, you cannot zip it up in the front, it doesn’t cover your legs, and you are not wearing real pants. My legs and chest and stomach were pricked by dead and pointy little leaves, and one innocent little leaf somehow managed to find its way inside my collar and drive a point into my neck that felt as large as a railroad spike.

  On my belly, holding my breath, I sidled closer. There were two little red flickering lights I had seen through the thick windows. As I watched, they were growing further apart. For a moment, it looked as if some creature with nocturnal red eyes were coming closer. Then it looked more like the creature were wall-eyed, his pupils growing further and further apart as one eyeball wandered away to the right while the other eyeball stayed where it was.

  They were not eyes. They were candles. The power was out but someone was in the basement.

  The right candle was now moving away from the first at about the pace of a slow walk. I saw this second light disappear from one window, and then appear and cross the next window, and then the next, until it reached the last basement window, the one farthest from me.

  Suddenly, as bright as a lightning flash, white and clear light danced and blinked and streamed from all the basement windows, throwing black shadows shaped like a row of the letter m fantastically elongated across the parking lot from the hoops of stone embracing the windows. There was a hum like bees.

  I blinked for a moment, half blind, before my eyes adjusted, and I realized what I was seeing. The fuse box was at the back of the building. Someone carrying a candle had walked back to the fuse box and reset the fuse. The light coming from the window was just the fluorescent tubes set in the basement ceiling, flickering into brightness.

  But that bee-hum was louder than I thought the basement lights should sound. Cautiously, I pulled my head out from beneath the holly bush where the startling flare of lights had jerked it (ow, ow and ow), and I squinted in through the little crescent-shaped crack of the opened window next to me.

  I was between two rooms, with the dividing wall right in front of my nose, so that with my left eye, I saw the main basement area. A stairway as steep as a ladder led down into a utility room with workbenches and a broken washing machine. With my right eye, I saw the older part, the wine cellar beneath the original building. Beyond the wine cellar, to the far right, was an open space with a diesel generator bolted to the concrete floor and thick cables leading up to the Museum proper. Call it the generator room, even though it was in the wine cellar. On the far wall, next to the stairs that led up to the outer cellar door, was the fuse box.

  Standing by the fuse box, with a candle in one hand, the door of the fuse box in the other, blinking, was Penelope Dreadful in all her golden-haired glory, long shining tresses, full lips, high cheekbones and regal eyes, looking lovely as Juno, Queen of the Gods. If Juno wore eyeglasses.

  5. A Sigh of Lovesickness

  She was wearing a lab coat, I remember.

  Actually, to be honest, I remember she was wearing dark-soled beige shoes with a small heel and little brass buckles on the ankle straps, nylon stockings, a knee-length dark skirt with a thin brown belt, a white blouse with a rounded collar, and over all this the aforementioned lab coat, slightly too large for her, that made her look adorable.

  Actually, to be more honest, I remember with excruciating clarity her shapely legs in those nylons, curvaceous hips in that skirt, the leonine flatness of the belly cinched by that belt, and, most of all, I remember that white blouse straining against the rounded glory of her bosom, and how the little white buttons pulled tiny, curving lines of tension across the fabric as she breathed …

  Okay. That is too much honesty. Never mind what I remember. I remembered myself with a hot touch of shame beating in my cheeks, and tore my gaze away.

  Attractive young woman in a lab coat. Wearing glasses. You got the picture. It was the girl.

  What’s more, it was a girl in what looked like absolutely no danger whatever. There was not a science fiction fan in sight.

  Actually, the fact that I was not wearing pants while staring at her through the window made me look like the only source of danger here. A sad thought for a would-be rescuer.

  Also not in sight were the goggles she wears to ride her putt-putt scooter. When not in use, she parks them low around her neck on a strap like a really big and awkward necklace, so that there is always a twin glint of glass near her bosom whenever she jogs unexpectedly around a corner while you are mopping or something, bright enough to catch and draw your eye. Then you have to pretend you were looking somewhere else without it being obvious you are pretending, even though there is no need for you to pretend because you were only looking at her goggles.

  She looks adorable when she puts them on, too, because then she looks like a pearl diver or a biplane aviatrix. Penny takes off her eyeglasses to wear these riding goggles, so I assume either (a) that she is farsighted and therefore uses her eyeglasses only for reading fine print, or (b) that she is nearsighted and therefore she is fated to kill a dozen motorists in a multiple-car crash caused by young men all swerving and flipping their vehicles to avoid a catastrophe of Mister Magoo proportions.

  Of course, I have seen her before, many a day, not wearing these goggles, such as when she takes a cab to the Museum, which she does when running late. The extra minutes it took for the cab to go to the motel and pick her up were still quicker than that cranky little scooter. Late, or in a hurry. And cabs run even early in the morning, before dawn.

  Which explained why her motor scooter was not in sight.

  6. A Sigh of Disappointment

  If you are wondering why I did not call out to her at that moment, I have to explain something embarrassing.

  I will not bother to describe the sense of crushing disappointment that caught in my throat at that moment. It would make me look silly. Sillier. Hmm... more silly.

  I had wanted to help her. Is that so bad? Does that make me sound weird?

  I also thought about her all the time, and yes, memorized what she took in her coffee, and I thought her goggles were sexy. So I admit that is weird. You have a lot of time to think when you are mopping floors. But a young man wanting to play the white knight to a damsel in distress is not. It is as natural as doves cooing in springtime.

  Yes, I should have rejoiced to find her unmussed and in sound health instead of being tied hand and foot, screaming, dangling above a trashcan whose lid was a ticking time clock, which, when the red countdown reached zero, would pop open to reveal the scarlet eyes of menacing, drug-maddened, man-eating raccoons, whom I could plink off with my low caliber squirrel rifle as they poured forth from the trashcan’s dark depth, clutching sinister knives and forks
in their paws. Then their heads could be mounted and stuffed on the walls of the nursery where our ten to twelve children would play. Mr. Gertz could do the stuffing.

  Instead I pouted. So sue me.

  I’ll remind you that at that point I had been ignominiously wounded in combat by a low-hanging stealth light-bulb, a deadly groin-seeking sword pommel, a butt-smiting flashlight, and a sadistic holly bush. Not wounded, severely, but I wasn’t back at my house sipping improperly-stirred instant hot cocoa either.

  All for nothing. I guess I could always help her in some other fashion. Like getting her a coffee with two creams no sugar. Women respect boys younger than them and not able to get into college who bring coffee, and don’t stare at their breasts when they come jouncing unexpectedly around a corner, or so I hear. Just not in this dimension.

  I was really in the mood to shoot a science fiction fan just then. Like I said, there was no one in sight.

  7. A Sigh of Awe

  But there was something in sight, in the utility room, and it might have been a prop from a science fiction show. I turned my head.

  The incandescent light bulb in the generator room had come on right away, shining on Penny in all her Penny-ness. The fluorescent tube bolted to the bare rafter in the utility room, on the other hand, hesitated, flickering and fluttering as it came to life. That flash was like a camera bulb going off in my eyes, which were right near the same level as the buried ceiling, if you recall, and I blinked, but I could see the thing burnt into my retina.

  In the utility room the table was connected by large cables running through a plug box through a small hole originally meant for wine bottles into the generator room. The worktable was covered with circuit boards and circuit breakers, rheostats, resistors, all surrounding what looked like an upright metal doughnut made of gold and as thick as a child’s leg.

  I guess you have to imagine a child of a cowboy, because the kid is really bowlegged. The metal doughnut was an electromagnet, and it was wrapped tightly with naked electrical wiring.

  Most doughnuts, if you bit them in half, would be circular in cross section. I want you to imagine this doughnut was triangular in cross-section, like a prism that has been bent in a hoop till its ends touch. I also want you to imagine that the triangle is torqued in a one-third roll before the ends are soldered together, so that there is only one surface to the prism, but this one surface, if you followed it with your finger, would twist around and around on itself three times, like stripes on a barber pole, before it came back to where it started. The hoop looked a little bit like those triangles made of three arrows chasing each others' tails you sometimes see on recycling bins. It was the kind of thing M.C. Escher would draw.

  Maybe this was gold leaf covering a core of some conductive metal. If that thing was solid, the Professor was bizarrely rich, or backed by someone who was. Who builds a solid gold circular electromagnet?

  Maybe not. The thing was shining like only gold shines, bright as an old Double Eagle coin, and the naked copper wiring was shining a slightly redder shade of yellow, bright as new pennies, and I caught my breath in awe. It looked like some magnificent Aztec idol, barbaric and massive, mated to brilliant modern technology, ambitious and potent.

  And I knew the Professor must have been insane. Who uses uninsulated wiring? Anyone brushing up against the machine would suffer a powerful shock.

  The second candle, the one that I had thought was the eye of a creature, was glued by its own wax on the table, next to the Professor’s blueprints and notes. I recognized them because Penny had needed my help getting the Professor’s laptop (which I jimmied the lock on his rolltop desk to get to, remember?) to connect to the printer, which had also needed a new ink cartridge. It was page after page of little triangular scratch-marks grouped in neat little squares. The Disaster Cuneiforms. It was the instructions on how to build a gateway to other Earths with other histories, and how to turn it on.

  And everything must have been plugged in right, and the instructions must have been followed correctly, because when the power came back on when the new fuse connected, the twisted electromagnet hoop did indeed turn on.

  The circuits had taken a moment or two to warm up, about the amount of time it takes for a young man to let out a sigh of lovesickness, then of disappointment, turn his head, blink in the dazzle of a silent explosion of light, and utter a third sigh of awe — and the darned thing started humming.

  Humming? Throbbing. I could feel the vibration from the Moebius coil in my teeth.

  And that was the moment I screamed.

  Because the twisted triangular hoop started to glow. The air around it shimmered like you’d see above a pavement on a hot day, that makes it look like there is water there, when there is no water.

  The humming climbed in pitch to a shriek, and the shimmering thickened to a blur and the twisted hoop began to crawl with colored sparks.

  The sparks flared and fanned out like a peacock opening its tail, forming an almost continuous circle of many colors, ring within ring.

  The outermost was violet almost too dark to see, then a circular band of piercing navy blue and sky blue blending into green, into delicate gold the color of a canary’s wing, into a warm orange like coils in the toaster oven on high, blending finally into the color of a cherry sunset. It looked like the rings of Saturn hovering sideways. Each tint looked pure.

  It was beautiful. It was everything I ever wanted in my life: the gateway out of the beartrap of my comfortable life and the window into the Somewhither.

  And I was screaming my head off.

  Chapter Three: The Door into Nowhere

  1. The Shrieking Marmoset

  Mind you, I did not want to scream.

  I wanted to give forth a loud yet manly shout, as penetrating to the ear as the call of the Spartans in battle at Thermopylae, able to be heard over the commotion of war and the screams of dying Persians, but showing no trace of fear or distress. A John Wayne kind of shout, nicely bass.

  Nope. I screamed like a dying Persian, or maybe like a Persian eunuch. It was a soprano note.

  Did I mention how lovely the Moebius coil rings seemed, a glittering circle of energy in midair, shimmering like summer sunlight refracted into living gems by the spray of mist from a fountain of water?

  Let me also mention that I could not think of a single form of energy known to my extensive high-school level of scientific knowledge that would create that kind of beautiful discharge of such bright colors that was (1) not hotter than heck, radioactivity-wise; (2) not far less safe than putting a metal spoon in a microwave and turning it on with the door open; and (3) not creating ions, high-energy particles, gamma radiation, and whatever that junk is that makes the aurora borealis look so pretty.

  And I did not know what the machine was. As far as I was concerned, that pretty rainbow ring could have been the freaking Death Star powering up its main-dish industrial-strength planet-cleansing Obliterification Ray. I knew then that Professor Dreadful, even if he wasn’t literally crazy, was a dangerous lunatic. Who would build such a crazy thing in the basement where your own innocent daughter might be wandering?

  Remember that from my position above and outside, I could see into the generator room through the one window and into the workroom with the humming rainbow death machine through the other, but that there was a cinderblock wall separating the two.

  The darned thing was pointed toward that wall. On the other side of the wall was the most beautiful girl in the world, right in the line of fire and completely oblivious to her danger.

  “Penny! Run!” I screamed. “Go up the back stairs! Get away from the machine!”

  Through the other window, I saw her head lift, and turn left and right. She could tell I was above her, but not where.

  I could see the lovely rainbow ring. It was getting brighter. Little firefly dots of light, like sometimes you see when you splash something on a red stove burner in that kitchen that intimidates you, started to appear in some of the
bands of color around the mouth of the Coil.

  The voice of Penny seemed weird because it was so calm. Of course, she did not know why I was shouting. She did not know she was in the line of fire from a death ray. The concrete wall was in the way, and the wine shelves.

  “Mr. Marmoset? Is that you?”

  She has a faint accent or rhythm to her speech, a very precise pronunciation. It reminds me of the way Bollywood Actresses follow British pronunciation, but sound too musical and rich to be Englishwomen.

  “It’s Muromets! MUROMETS!” I shouted back, “The machine is dangerous: it is leaking some sort of radiation! Go out the back way. Don’t go back in the workroom! RUN!”

  She did not run. Instead she crossed her arms (which pushed up her bosom ever so slightly) and turned her foot to one side (which cocked her hips ever so slightly) and tapped her foot impatiently (which emphasized the curve of her nylon-clad calf ever so slightly).

  “Mr. Marmoset, who sent you?”

  “The Professor!”

  “How much did he tell you?”

  Strange. That was exactly what my father had said. Everyone seemed worried about other people not telling me things.

  I am sure there was an innocent explanation for it, and that this creepy feeling like Arctic ants crawling over my spine was totally an overreaction. No doubt the town of Tillamook decided to hold a holiday where, once a year, everyone keeps a bunch of secrets from just one unfortunate dupe, and today it just so happened to be my day.

  “He told me everything!” I said this, not because it was true, but because I wanted her to listen to me. I made a mental note to tell that next time I went to confession also. “Your father told me most of all to get you out of danger!”

  She looked thoughtful. “Ah—my father—perhaps is not in the best of health at this moment—I am sorry if he frightened you, Mr. Marmoset, but everything is under control.”