After a few minutes of fumbling he found the remote wedged between his ass and the back of the couch and managed to hit the off button. Roger lay back down and stared at the ceiling, knowing that real sleep was completely lost. His head was throbbing in a continuous rhythm with his pumping heart.
“Damn invitation,” he muttered under his breath as he forced himself to stand up and stretch. He didn’t want to move, but unless he wanted piss running down his jeans and into his couch cushions there was no other choice. Besides, sooner or later he was going to have to brush his teeth. Those white beacons were his constant reminder that he was nothing like those rednecks he had gone to high school with. He comforted himself with the fact that he did have some standards as he tried to take his first step from the couch and almost fell over.
After he managed to stagger into the bathroom, Roger stood just inside the doorway, his arm cut off midway by the absolute darkness of the small, windowless room as he fumbled for the light-switch. In order to reach the switch he had to lean into the doorway and feel around the corner. Roger didn’t mind entering most dark rooms, but the bathroom was an exception. He hadn’t been able to enter a dark bathroom for a long time.
The switch clicked on at the same time that the bulbs burned into his eyes. As soon as that happened, relief flooded through him and Roger went straight to the toilet, sighing as his muscles relaxed in steady time to the stream of hot urine leaving his body.
As soon as he was done, Roger turned around and looked at himself in the mirror. He rubbed a hand down his tired face and across his day old stubble. He hadn’t made an effort to do anything constructive since he’d gotten the invitation; in fact, he was still in his dirty work jeans and shoes, his shirt the only thing he’d had enough energy to strip off.
The wedding had not been something he’d wanted to hear about, much less be invited to, and even now the thought brought a sour taste to his already dry mouth. Roger began to brush his teeth in harsh, jerky strokes, purging his mouth of everything but peppermint and blood.
Bear trotted to the bathroom, his nails clicking across the floor until he came to rest by the door, his head slightly tilted as he looked up at Roger.
“What’s the matter, boy?” Roger asked through a mouthful of toothpaste. He smiled and a mixture of sticky soft toothpaste ran down his chin in a foam bubble. He leaned forward, putting one hand against the mirror to brace himself as he went to spit the toothpaste into the sink. He was wiping his mouth off with his left hand when he noticed that his right hand wasn’t moving.
He jerked it back as hard as he could, but it stayed put. It was stuck to the mirror.
Roger stared at his hand and then at his reflection, unsure of what to do next. When he saw his eyes, a tremor ran through his body so fast that his teeth clacked together.
They have to be your eyes. Stop being so paranoid.
The ghosts of his memory were coming out of their graves on their own, howling and shrieking through his mind. For a second he was on the verge of remembering everything, of understanding his entire life, but that faded as the mirror began to close its cool, confining grip over his hand.
The grip on his wrist tightened the more he jerked. No matter what he did, he could still see his hand sinking into the mirror. Silky glass slid up and over his flesh, its ice cold touch sending chills up and down his body until he was nothing but a giant patch of gooseflesh. Then there was nothing, perfect dull nothingness as he was pulled into an unseen abyss, until there was nothing left but a bloodless stump left. Roger’s body went completely slack as he glided into shock.
It’s just a dream, Roger, just one long, fucked-up dream. That’s it, that’s all there is to it.
Roger heard Bear growling, and he immediately turned toward him. Bear’s fur stuck out in spiky chocolate tufts and stretched across a bundle of tense muscles, his lips pulled back to reveal a horrible snarling smile. The worst part was the way his eyes gleamed with a combination of fear and hatred that Roger had never seen in any animal before, much less loveable old Bear.
When he turned back to the mirror, he found that he had put his left hand against the glass, and now both of them had sank through its metallic coated surface. A roar of confusion tumbled through his head, and somewhere in the background he could hear Bear barking frantically.
Bracing his thighs against the sink, Roger leaned back, every muscle straining against his skin until he was sure they were going to pop straight through his skin. It was no use. The more he fought, the more his body was drawn in. It was as if he’d been caught in mercury quicksand. The mirror was only a breath away and both of his arms were now cut off at the shoulders. He watched, his chest heaving with exhaustion and tight with worry, as the mirror reached towards him with a calm, icy fist. It was like watching water in reverse. Instead of sinking in with gravity, it was steadily making its way towards him. The numbing, glassy surface pressed against his face, tightening around each of his pores before sliding across his face and around his neck.
As soon as his head crossed the silvery threshold, Bear’s increasingly frantic noises no longer existed. It wasn’t as if they had been silenced, but in the pitch-black world he was now in, it was possible to believe there had never been a Bear at all. Even though he couldn’t see anything, he could feel his hands when he pressed them against his face, and he found himself oddly grateful for he fact that he’d at least come out whole on this side.
In one last attempt to free himself, Roger tried to pull back through to the real world, to Bear and even to the horrible wedding invitation. As he did, the passageway closed in around his airway. His mouth opened and closed like a fish struggling for air, but instead of relief, each breath constricted his throat further until his lungs burned with as intensely as lava. Roger felt the fight drain from him as he gave up and leaned into the darkness. The cool air rushed in, and he gulped at it furiously until he felt that he had finally regained some kind of control.
Oh, did little Roger hurt himself? Is he gonna cry like a little girl cuz the mirror got him? A voice in his head that resembled the long gone Jimmy Bowen taunted him, laughing at the situation and at Roger. The fear had been replaced by something more sedated, a calm ebony world that wound its way around him like a ribbon of night.
The satin surface tightened against Roger’s skin, suffocating his pores and momentarily gripping him around the waist before letting the rest of his body slide through unharmed.
Once his entire body had passed through, he sat on a ledge of empty space and took a deep breath. He couldn’t see back through the mirror. There was nothing, only darkness. Roger curled up in a ball, gripping his legs until his knees brushed up against his chin. The cold had begun to feel like a layer of mud that pressed against every inch of his skin, its thickness suspending him in the darkness.
As he sat there, he could feel the air shifted around him, giving way until he gradually felt himself slipping through the ebony world. He clawed at the air, trying to grab onto something, but the thickness that had been there only moments before faded to nothing more than fog with his touch. Within seconds, the substance that had held him up failed completely, and he found himself plummeting through nothingness.
He tried to scream, but no sound escaped his lungs. The air rushing by his face was moving so fast and with such force that he couldn’t inhale. If not for the momentum he felt, he wouldn’t have known he was moving. There was no hollow roar of wind, no pressure on his face or skin, simply the movement of his body as he tumbled over himself.
Roger clawed at his face and throat, trying to find some way to force the air into his lungs, but nothing helped. His throat burned as if he had screamed it raw, and his lungs were like two hot coals smoldering in his chest. As Roger began to lose consciousness, ghost voices and song fragments floated through his head.
It had been over sixteen years since the last time he danced to Manfred Mann’s The Mighty Quinn with his mother, but he could still remember her soft voic
e and bouncing laugh.
That’s right, Roger thought as he fought to stay awake, Quinn was an Eskimo. The song echoed through his head, relaxing him. It had been one of his mother’s favorites, and she used to play it on her old record player while they danced around the room.
Just when her voice began to trail off and leave him, his body was thrown against a harsh, unforgiving surface. A deep, rattling cough racked his entire body before he was finally able to draw a breath into his still burning lungs. As the stinging subsided and his limbs returned to him, Roger opened his eyes a slit and was immediately assaulted by a bright, green glow. It took him a few moments to realize that he was in a circular room made of green stained glass.
Each pane was a different shade of green, ranging from lush forest green to puke green. Pulling himself up on his elbows, he gazed around the room, forcing himself to take several deep, controlled breaths until his lungs felt normal.
There wasn’t any kind of door to the room that he could see. He rolled onto his side and inspected the piece of glass he had landed on, but there wasn’t a single crack on its surface. This was a miracle considering the speed and velocity of his body at the point of impact.
Where in hell did glass that strong come from? Where am I?
He grimaced as the pain once again flared from a dull roar into full agony as he tried to stand. He gripped his head with both hands as the pain drove him onto his knees.
“Ow! My fuckin’ head!” His scream rang through the still air, startling him. He had forgotten how quiet everything was until he heard his own shrill voice echoing in the round chamber.
“I can talk,” Roger thought out loud, actually amazed at the sound of his own voice. He remembered the last thing he had heard before now had been Bear’s frantic barking.
“Hey! Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?” Roger croaked, grabbing his head as it once again began to throb. “I need an Aspirin.”
“I’m afraid we have nothing to offer you, but sleep will take care of it,” a disembodied voice tried to assure him. “If you just relax, everything will be better when you awaken.”
Roger was startled. He had not been expecting an answer, but he still responded without thinking.
“Sleep? How am I supposed to sleep? There’s not even a bed or a blanket.”
“Do you always have to have a bed to sleep?”
“No, but…. Where are you? Why can’t I see you?”
“You’re in a special chamber. It often takes awhile to adjust, and you will have to stay here until that has been completed.”
“Adjust to what? Besides this horrible monster of a headache, I feel fine. I just want out of this room.” The soft, glowing, green panes were starting to give him the creeps.
The voice returned, this time more exasperated than before. “I promise, sleep would be a good thing.”
“Sleep? You want me to sleep after that?” Roger screamed, ignoring the pain that flared up with each word. “I don’t give a shit about sleep or anything else except answers.”
Roger waited, but there wasn’t a response. Whomever he’d been talking to had decided to leave.
Firturro stood in front of the viewing window and shook his head as he watched Roger crawl across the floor patting down the walls like a rat stuck in a maze. He sighed as he turned away from his side of the glass. The light shined through the one-way observation and caused shadows to march across his tired face.
The council wasn’t exactly happy with him. He had argued with them for two days, remaining steady in his support of Roger, which annoyed them. When he had talked during the meeting, it had only been to try to convince them that, with enough time, this human would adjust and decide upon an appropriate path.
Firturro didn’t have any misconceptions about the council’s views, and he knew that his defense of a mere human disgusted them. They wouldn’t admit a human, no matter how brilliant, had the capability to walk the line between free will and fate. To them, humans were nothing but substandard creatures who could only live and reproduce, and that’s why Obawok had been decreed their caretakers. Humanity’s flaws were just more assurance of the divine status of Obawok.
In the end, none of his arguments had mattered. No one in the council had taken his side, not even the ones who sometimes agreed with Firturro’s more liberal views. In their opinion, the subject had been given twenty-seven years. That had been enough time to make an appropriate decision. They kept insisting that this was especially true in Roger’s case since most people make the decision during or before their twentieth year. Here was this human male almost thirty years old and still undecided. To the council, that was worse then blasphemy, and they didn’t feel they could wait any longer lest his soul be left to perish between worlds.
“Do you think he’ll be okay? Do you think he’ll be able to make it through the Mezoglike?” Tigaffo questioned as Firturro eyed him. Tigaffo was staring at Roger expectantly, and Firturro kept waiting for him to start openly salivating over Roger’s test. It wasn’t good for watchers to anticipate their subject’s ultimate downfall. Some watchers may have delighted in the spilling of human blood, but he was certainly not one of them and would not abide an apprentice who did.
“I certainly hope so, because the alternative isn’t good.” He turned, facing Tigaffo dead-on before finishing. “But it wasn’t my decision to make, and the council believed this was needed.”
Firturro brushed past the too eager Tigaffo and headed down the corridor to his chambers. The excitement and confusion of the past few days had denied him much needed rest and food, and he was paying the price. The body that had served him so well for thousands of years was finally breaking down, and he actually welcomed it.
He looked over his shoulder at Tigaffo. “You should try to use this time to rest. We’re going to be extremely busy when he’s released from the chamber. As his appointed guardians, we’ll have to assist him with everything he needs to learn before taking the Mezoglike.”
Tigaffo nodded and shuffled off in the opposite direction down the dingy and poorly lit hall to the dorms where the apprentices slept. Most watchers didn’t get to experience something of this magnitude until they had been practicing watchers for a few hundred years.
Obawok society was based on conformity and strict adherence to the rules. Lately, many of the other watchers had become even more aware of Firturro’s rogue thoughts concerning the ancient practices and had started going out of their way to avoid him when he came near, their downcast glances and their shuffling footsteps the only contact they allowed him. Any conversations they had been having when he got there were immediately cut off, and several of the councilman’s eyes flared bright before they too turned and left him in silence, and Firturro didn’t blame them. It was dangerous to be associated with someone who questioned things.
His old age allowed him the ability to ignore these childish attempts to ostracize him, but he knew how damaging rumors and innuendo could be to someone as young as Tigaffo. Firturro knew it was because of this shameful association that Tigaffo felt a very personal sense of pride associated with his new mission, and Firturro wasn’t so old or uncaring that he couldn’t understand the boy’s youthful vigor. He just hoped that once Tigaffo saw what the test really was, he would lose this boyish sense of adventure. If Tigaffo couldn’t understand the need to preserve human life, Firturro would have to see to it that he was reassigned to another department and trained to do another task.
Firturro reached his door and entered his modest but cozy apartment through a series of push button switches that released the mechanical door lock, one item among many whose original concept had been stolen from earth. This small token of safety was issued to Obawok who were high ranking enough to need certain privacies, but Firturro knew there was no such thing as privacy on this planet. There was nothing in Obawok the Council President didn’t immediately know how to access or control at the snap of a finger. If he wanted in Firturro’s apartment, nothing as trivial as
this basic locking system would stop him. Despite this knowledge, hearing its mechanical lock tighten behind him did make the tension in his muscles ease.
Firturro slipped off his heavy velvet watcher’s cloak and looked around the room as he hung it on a nearby peg. There was nothing extravagant to the three small rooms; in fact, there was almost nothing at all in them except his glowing glass paned bed and a man-made chair that had been given to him as a gift by his old master, Lithirro.
Without even looking toward the kitchen, Firturro climbed into bed, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep. Obawok didn’t often dream, but when they did, it was deemed as a prophetic message from the ancients. So even though his faith in the ancients was partial at best, he still wanted nothing more than to dream of Roger well and alive on earth, where he belonged.
207
Two
Welcome to Lollipop Land
The steady click of footsteps on the heavy glass caused Roger to fling open his eyes as the sudden memory of what had happened flooded through him.
How did they get in?
He sat up and turned towards the steadily approaching footsteps, his entire body creaking as he moved. At first, all Roger could see was a small, sleep-fuzzy figure. He rubbed his eyes and immediately gasped when his vision cleared.
This couldn’t be a product of his imagination because he’d never seen anything like it. The short, squatty creature stood about four foot tall and had thick, leathery dark green skin. It wore a floor length cloak that perfectly matched this unusual skin tone, and its wild crimson hair set off its deeply lined face and brilliant purple eyes. Its rough, squatty bulldog-like face was ugly, yet like the dog it reminded him of, it was also oddly appealing.
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