by Mick Farren
In the other weird new world of up and out, he saw all of that, but so much more. A brand new sky was above him, arched with lingering trajectories of multiple moons. In this extraordinary realm, none of the angles and spacial relationships made sense according to the way he previously had seen the world. The Virginia woods and open hillsides were all around him, except they now danced with a unique fragmented light, and other alien landscapes of rods and cones and things that he was unable to describe, even to himself, rose at fourth and fifth right angles from them. Thinking entities both hideous and beautiful, some simultaneously, moved over the impossible surfaces. Time itself was not as Argo had known it. It was either a fraction of a second ahead or an equal fraction behind his old world, and, with other impossible factors added, and even vaguer and more insubstantial impressions of what might be the future or the present being somehow overlaid with afterimages and echoes of the past.
He could see himself, and Slide, and the enemy horseman. He could see his thoughts and those of the lancer like a colored aura, except the colors were ones that he had never seen before and were nothing like the blues, yellows, and greens, and all the tones in between, to which he had forever been accustomed. Only Slide had no such glow around him, only a dark demon essence. Beyond the copse, he could sense the thoughts of the other riders and even the horses. Farther afield, he sensed the bodies of the recently dead, Bonnie’s among their number, and the fugitive Rangers, purposeful but scattered, making their way to a prearranged map reference where they would regroup. Argo was also not alone; two more like himself, golden-glowing and together, moved sinuously one on the other, while another was seeking like himself, but wrapped in a blanket of frustration, loss, and fear, and all three were too distant for Argo to reach. Much as he was loath to admit it, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that these were the rest of the Four.
Above all, Slide had been right.
His instruction to “take yourself out of the picture that their eyes are receiving” now made absolute sense. Argo could do it. He simply reached into a possible future and removed himself and Slide from the exact moment in time when the Mamaluke looked at them. For the enemy lancer, they simply did not exist.
“All secure in here.”
The man’s mounted companion nodded, and the one on foot pushed his way out of the copse. Argo had done it. He had gone up and out and saved them both. He wanted to talk, to babble, to ask questions, and to look more at the unearthly dimension that had opened up for him, but the Mamalukes were far from gone. The one who searched the copse rejoined his partner, replaced his helmet, mounted his horse, took back his lance, and then the two of them trotted back to the main body of horsemen. The lancers then did nothing except wait, until Argo thought he would go crazy. Then, not a moment too soon, a horn blared from someplace up on the ridge. The call was clearly a prearranged signal from the quartet of scouts, because, the moment they heard it, the entire troop of lancers spurred their mounts and took off at the gallop. Slide stood up and watched them go. Then he turned to Argo. “So you did it, didn’t you?”
Argo was still breathless. “I went into a place, but I didn’t understand any of it, the why, the how, the where. I don’t have a clue what I did.”
“And you may have to resign yourself to the possibility that you never really will.”
RAPHAEL
Raphael lay in his blanket on hard and cold ground that was covered with just a thin, damp groundsheet. He stared up at the canvas just above him and ached. He yearned for the two women. He could see their faces; he could see their bodies; he was excited by the scanty clothing they had been wearing when he had seen them. If he had dared admit how he was feeling, Melchior would have had a word for it: cuntstruck. Melchior used the word a lot, but it wasn’t that. The longing he felt was not one of crude lust or raw teenage frustration. It went far deeper, so deep, in fact, that it seemed to emanate from a place that he totally did not understand and could not locate inside himself. It was not that he wanted to fuck them, and he was not the victim of any kind of what others might call puppy love. He did not know the names of the two young women, although he suspected the one with the red hair was the Lady Blakeney, she of the strange name and title that he had inexplicably uttered back there on the highway. Raphael’s only consolation was that his preoccupation with the women was so strong that it pushed the awareness of his hunger, discomfort, and fear to the back of his mind. His stomach rumbled, the ground was bone-chilling and unyielding, and his muscles ached from marching and being bounced in a truck all the way from Savannah. He was exhausted, and yet, tired as he was, sleep refused to come. The women seemed to be willing him to find them. But he only had the enigmatic sign near where he’d seen them, that had read RQ-38, as his single clue.
Elsewhere in the tent, Sheg, the Teuton conscript, was snoring loudly in what amounted to a drunken stupor. Sheg had, along with Raphael, Raoul, and Pascal, been one of Melchior’s foraging party, the one that had found precious little in the way of food but plenty in the way of alcohol, and had been regaled by the underofficer with tales of drunken Mamalukes. They had been able to steal nothing in the Teuton officers’ section of the camp, beyond some table scraps, and a four-hour excursion had yielded only a sack of turnips, four loaves of bread, some yams, and two scrawny chickens that had come courtesy of a rather unorthodox transaction on the part of the now sleeping Sheg. Sheg had revealed himself as not being adverse to offering himself sexually. Oddly, at least to Raphael’s somewhat sheltered mind, Melchior had accepted this as a legitimate means to an end. In addition to the chickens, Sheg had also scored two bottles of just-about-drinkable railroad gin, but he had insisted he should keep them for himself since he was the one who had gone to all the trouble, and hence his current booze-coma. “I mean, you guys didn’t have to suck off those three bastards, did you?”
Raphael found himself drifting. He hoped it was, at long last, the onset of sleep, but it was not the same merciful dimming of the light and waning of wakefulness. As he stared unseeing at the angled canvas of the tent’s interior, it seemed to shimmer and melt. Could it be that, after all the Mosul training and conditioning, all the marching and abuse, his mind had finally given up? He felt himself rising, detaching from his body and entering a new world.
To his horror, he found that he recognized the place into which he had entered. He had seen the strange angles, the grotesque and nameless colors, and experienced the sense of distortion and overlapping time before. The lividly streaked alien sky, the up-curving horizon, the rods and cones, and the impossible crystallin e structures had all been in the frightening vision that had come unbidden to him as the formation of Dark Things had bounced past him on the highway and the Mothmen had fluttered above. Again his unexplained instinct told him that he was seeing a small section of the fourth dimension, and, somewhere nearby, the same impossible entities marched in ghastly ranks. He had been alone in the vision brought on by the Dark Things, but he could feel that others were hovering somewhere that was at one and the same time close to him but beyond his vision. And he knew, as unbelievable as it might sound, that they were the two women of his preoccupation, the Lady Blakeney and the other with the honey skin and dark eyes that he had seen so often in his dreams, on the pages of his drawings, and then, for real, in the Teuton officers’ section of the camp.
The women were not the only ones, however. He also sensed a young man like himself, also tired and also afraid, and who had briefly moved into the same dimension to save himself from some present and mortal danger. The knowledge of these others also did not stop at them merely being there, although that was enough of a shock on its own. A connection existed between the four them. Raphael did know what it meant or why it should be, but he had absolutely no doubt that it was.
No connection existed with the fourth human that he was sensing in this place of dimensional distortion. Quite the reverse. It was a hunter, and it was after Raphael and the others. It could not quite place their loc
ation, but it desired them, and it was seeking them and, again without doubt, intended them no good. This fourth being was a hunchbacked figure that radiated a refined and long-honed evil. It also had the power to command the denizens of this world, and Raphael could tell that it wielded a terrible power, and, new and inexperienced as he was to all this, he would have no chance if it ever located him. He might well have lingered too long in this unasked-for netherworld already.
As if in confirmation, he saw a Mothman coming in his direction. It was acting under the instructions of the hunchback, of that he was certain. The form and features of the thing were clearer than they had been back on the highway in what Raphael thought of as the real world, but his view of it was still more a matter of impression than of acute observation or clear-cut detail. He could see what appeared to be four beating wings attached to an insectoid, segmented body; he could see a pair of what looked to be black multifaceted eyes on either side of a vertical slit of a mouth, surmounted by a pair of long prehensile feelers or antennae that ended in fluttering digits that might have served as hands or fingers. What looked like powerful mandibles extended from the lower part of the head and, if relative size and proportion meant anything, could snap a man of his build in two. That the Mothman was coming in his direction, and possibly coming for him, was also a matter of relative size and proportion, but Raphael did not have such objectivity. He was sufficiently sure that he was in this place by mistake, that he was in peril and must get out as swiftly as possible. Far beneath him, he could see his corporal body in the wretched Mosul tent, and he willed himself downwards in a plunging, controlled dive to what he still, for better or worse, thought of as reality.
Raphael groaned and rolled over on the cold, damp groundsheet, dragging his blanket with him. None of the other conscripts even bothered to look at him as a spasm forced him to curl into a tight fetal ball. Stomach pains had become endemic among the Provincial Levies, and it was assumed that Raphael was either suffering hunger pangs or stomach cramps from what was literally rotgut booze, but the truth was that, as he had plunged by effort of will out of the strange other world in which he had found himself drifting, the Mothman had slashed at him with its mandibles, and although the attack had caused him no physical damage in the world of the Mosul camp, the residual pain was excruciating. The only mercy was that it seemed to ease as quickly as the dimension of Mothmen, hunchbacks, and what he was already beginning to think of as his three mysterious companions, faded to a dreamlike unreality. As the pain subsided, he tentatively uncurled his spine and, at the same time, recognized that nothing was as it should be. A bizarre and terrible door had now opened twice for him, and the stuff of dreams was making disturbing incursions into his waking life. He had seen the vision on the Continental Highway, and now, here in the wretched tent that he shared with the other cannon fodder, he had returned to the same place. He had no means to fight what was happening to him, and he was not at all sure that he should. The only consolation in all this, and what might perversely be his only source of strength, was that he had absolutely nothing to lose. He had the supreme advantage of being able to work on the assumption that he was dead already. Melchior was a good squad leader and would do his best to bring his men through the coming assault across the river and into Albany with as few casualties as possible, but Argo knew the odds were against them. Their chances of living through the campaign were slim to none in the armies of Hassan IX, where the taking of massive casualties was a time-honored battle tactic.
The only other factor that he had in his favor was that it seemed, in the grotesque dimension from which he had just fled, he had three potential friends and companions who, if he could only make himself known to them, might prove stronger than Pascal, Raoul, the shameless Sheg, or any of the other men in the tent with whom he might shortly be risking his life. He suspected that the same doors were opening for these other three, and that they might well be experiencing the same fear and confusion. A link seemed to be trying to establish itself between them, almost as though the four of them, if united, would be greater than the sum of their parts. Maybe they, too, were seeing the hunchback and running from the Mothmen, and, if they were together, they might have the capacity to stand and fight and perhaps, dare he say it, prevail. If he could find them in this hungry and brutal world of mud and threat and drunken soldiers, the hopeless odds might be redefined in their favor.
Raphael threw off his blanket and reached for his boots. He pulled them on, laced them, and then quietly stood up. No one paid him any attention as he slipped into his greatcoat, placed his helmet on his head, and picked up his rifle. He moved as routinely as he could, like a sentry going on guard. In his pocket were two contraband rounds of ammunition that he had, by a quick sleight of hand, failed to turn in after the foray into the woods to see the airship and look for the airmen. Picking his way between the forms of the sleeping men, he ducked out of the tent. Once outside, he took a deep breath of the night, despite that it smelled little better than the stench within. Soon it would be dawn and reveille, and shouting officers and braying trumpets would be rousing the camp to its daytime mode of chaos. If he was going to find the two girls, he would have to hurry and look exactly like just one more anonymous soldier going about his duties. He hitched his rifle a little more comfortably on his shoulder, trying not to think about how, with his first step, he had become a deserter.
“Vega!”
The sound of his name caused him to jerk and turn. His first thought was that Melchior had caught him, and now, at the very minimum, he would have a flogging to add to his burden of woe, but then he saw that it was only Pascal.
“Keep you voice down, you idiot.”
“Where are you going?”
Raphael looked about tensely. He could not waste time talking to Pascal. He had to get away. “I don’t know. I may be attempting to desert. I may be looking for food, or I may just be looking.”
“Can I come with you?”
Company in his folly was certainly a temptation, and two men going about their business might be more plausible than one. “We may only be walking into a hanging.”
Pascal did not care. “We’re going to fucking die anyway.”
“That’s pretty much the conclusion I came to.”
“So?”
“You may not like the places I intend to go.”
Pascal’s hopeless look made his words almost unnecessary. “Listen, I’m past caring.”
And Raphael relented. “Then get your stuff quick. Deserters must move fast.”
CORDELIA—JESAMINE
The two of them were one, and shuddering waves of pleasure rolled through what felt like a new and mutual nervous system. Cordelia and Jesamine, indivisibly intertwined, had become an exaltant and triumphant celebration of how, after all the mysteries, miseries, frustrations, and tantalizing dreams, they had finally and completely found each other. The joy of connection even allowed them to forget that this joyous and ecstatic conjoining was happening in a place so fundamentally foreign and unknown that, by most normal criteria, they should have been scared out of their minds. Their wildly rising spirits had merged under a blazing sky crisscrossed by what looked like racing and multiple-ringed moons and double and triple stars that left trails of light in their wake to mark their passage. Towering assemblies of cones, spheres, and cylinders reached for the moon-filled sky from an undergrowth of up-pointing crystal fingers, and it was impossible to say whether they were the constructions of those who dwelled in this place or the natural products of a very unnatural environment, but the linked minds of Jesamine and Cordelia were too blissfully euphoric, rapt and enraptured in the throes of something close to extended orgasm but, at the same time, very different from the merely sensual, for them to question how or why or where they found themselves. The illusion was that the transport of delight would continue to infinity, and time, as they once had known it, was subject to a complex distortion and seemed either a fraction of a second ahead or an equal fr
action behind the world as they knew it, and with an impossible complication of vaguer and more insubstantial impressions of what might be the future or the present being somehow overlaid with afterimages and echoes of the past.
Even in a place where time did not appear to be either regular or linear, though, the shock wave of exultation must sooner or later succumb to entropy and, first, level to a plateau, then break down entirely, its fuel of passion spent, to a fond and beloved ember. The details of their circumstances began increasingly to claim the attention of Cordelia and Jesamine.
“Have you been here before?”
“Have you been here before?”
To speak was redundant but habitual, and when they did, they spoke together, with one as an echo of the other.
“I believe I have.”
“I know I haven’t.”
“What is it?”
“What is it?”
“I think this place is one turn of the screw beyond our own.”
Cordelia and Jesamine quickly discovered that, in combination, one with the other, they could bring at least some of this place of the paranormal into manageable perspective. A measure of what they saw could only be imposed by their own minds. They certainly did not believe it was in any kind of objective reality that they walked on amber sand along the margin of a wine purple ocean, splashing in the shallows with strange jewels adorning their wrists and ankles and chaplets of golden blooms upon their brows, or that they floated like twin fleecy clouds above an idyllic landscape of orchards and rolling hills. These could only be a product of their own fantasies and desires for comfort and safety, hallucinatory representations of the solace and elation that they found in each other. They could enjoy these phantasms in the first wonder of finding each other and discovering the strange and wholly unexplored powers that their joining had unleashed, but they knew they must not forget or fool themselves that all would continue as perfection and remain so, then, now, and forever. Powerful good was present in this place, but, at the same time, a deep and threatening evil lurked somewhere at the periphery of all their wonderment. They had also not left the real world behind. This dimension that had opened was no hiding place. Far beneath them, the hideous encampment by the Potomac still stank and breathed in fetid anticipation of slaughter. The evil empire of Hassan IX was still poised to hurl itself on the defenders of Albany. Their bodies were still pressed against that of the unpleasant young Teuton officer like the memory of a pornographic charade that was simultaneously being acted out along a different but parallel track of time as they bargained sexual favors for a slim advantage in their struggle to survive.
