by Edward Aubry
So they walked on, hoping to find any sort of building to spend the night in, but when the sun set, it took almost no time for Harrison to get edgy, and they quit walking. This was the first time in over a week they had spent the night out in the open, but they had accumulated enough supplies that the prospect seemed little more than a mild inconvenience. Among the items Harrison had collected were a lamp, which shone bright enough to illuminate their entire camp site but was somehow frosted so that one could look straight at it and not be uncomfortable, and a heater, which would come in handy, as the first cold snap of the season had just arrived. Although Glimmer preferred to sleep in the grass, Harrison did not, and so his supplies also included a cot that was collapsible to the size of his hand.
As he set about unfolding it and setting it up, he listened to the Walkman. Glimmer watched him as he sang along to the Who song that he could hear, but (he assumed) she could not. He did his best Pete Townshend air guitar lick, then let himself be Keith Moon for a few bars. He turned, and seeing Glimmer watching him, lost the moment.
She motioned for him to take the headphones off. He lifted one pad off his ear. "Whatcha listening to?" she asked.
He grinned to make a show of not being embarrassed. "It's a song by The Who. 'Bargain.'" He pulled off the phones and hung them around his neck.
"Convenient," the pixie observed, "that she likes the same music you do."
"Convenient? Who?"
"Claudia, of course. Seems like every time you hear that broadcast, you get totally into the sing-along." A puzzled look came on her face. "Are you still humming?"
"No," he said. "Humming sounds like this," and he began to hum the song he had been singing. He assumed he was playing into her joke.
"SHHH!" Because of the way she made him hear her, it came through loud and clear. She frowned, tilted her head, and pulled her hair back from her pointy ears. "Do you hear that?" she asked, and for the first time since he had met her, she said it without moving her lips. She was right. It did creep him out.
"What?"
"Humming," she said, still not moving her lips. "Inane, pointless humming."
"No," he whispered, exaggerating his own lip movements, hoping she would pick up the clue. She didn't.
"Don't look at me," she said.
"What?" he asked, staring at her.
"Shh! Don't. Look. At. Me." Then she started to fade. She didn't completely fade, but after a few seconds, he could almost see right through her, and then all he could make out was her outline and wings as a cloudy silhouette. Despite her orders to the contrary, he kept staring straight at her. The sight of this pixie becoming translucent transfixed him. She darted away.
The urge to track her with his eyes was compelling, but he was able to do what she insisted by focusing on the spot where she had just been. His trust in her was now uncompromising, and he assumed that she had an excellent reason for him to be silent and not draw attention to her. As he made those connections he realized what her reason must be. They were being watched.
He made a dutiful show of going about his business then, for the benefit of whoever (whatever?) found them so interesting. Nothing to see here, he mimed for all the world to see. Nothing. Nada. He hoped that the sweat that poured down his forehead did not shatter the illusion.
A pair of hands clapped behind his head. The sound might as well have been a cannon firing.
"Ghaaah!" He turned, throwing his hands over his face. Through his fingers he could see Glimmer looking at her hands. From her expression, he thought they must contain a handkerchief filled with snot. Or a dead animal.
"Fuck," she said.
Harrison waited to see where she was going with that.
"Have you ever seen one of these?" She thrust her palms out to him. He couldn't tell, at first, what was in them, because they were glowing. Then he realized the glow was what was in them. They were covered with some kind of luminescent goo, like what one might expect to find inside a Halloween glow stick.
"One of what?" he asked. She sighed impatiently and pushed her palms closer to his face. Upon closer inspection, he was able to confirm his original analysis, that she was holding some sort of glowing slime, although he now considered upgrading that to glowing pus. "Oh," he said. "No. No, I've never seen that before." Then he saw insect wings, and it came together that she had a squished firefly. His panic subsided to relief. This insect was no threat, but it must have been too mundane for Glimmer to identify it as harmless.
"Fuck," she said, wiping her hands on her pants. Harrison was taken by how cute they looked with phosphorescent streaks on them. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." She looked up from her pants and said, "Get your pack."
He felt his heart flush, and his relief swirled down and out. Not a firefly. Something horrible. In seconds, he had scooped up his pack and donned it, ready to light out in an instant.
"Put that down!" she said. "We need what's in it."
He pulled it off and dumped the contents onto the grass. She swooped down, grabbed a random device (the camera thing, he realized), carried it about ten feet from the standing lamp, and dropped it on the ground. She flew back, grabbed something else, and dropped it a few feet away from the first. "Make a circle," she instructed as she came back for a third thing.
"What's happening?"
"Circle first," she said. "Questions later."
They had just enough items in the pack to make most of a circle, though there was a gap on one side. "What about the pack itself?" he asked.
"Let me see it," she said, touching down next to it. "Yes. Yes, this is technology, not just a bag, right? This will do fine." She used it to plug the hole. Then she went to his Walkman, also part of the circle, and pulled out the headphones. She yanked the wires out of the ear pads, then peeled them apart, all the way to the jack.
"Hey!" interjected Harrison, watching his only link to his actual goal being destroyed.
"We need a binder," she said. "Do you have any more wire?"
He stared at his ruined headphones. No more Claudia. Just like that. Fingers were snapping in his face.
"Wire? More?" She was losing patience and starting to look afraid. He had never seen her afraid. It sobered him.
He made a frantic search for wire, then grabbed a rock and smashed a device whose purpose he had not yet determined. Whatever it did apparently did not require internal wiring. He smashed another, no luck. Third time was the charm. That one had a core wrapped with some sort of filament. Once he unwound it, he found they had more than enough to go around the whole circle. He noted, not without irony, that the death of his headphones had been meaningless.
Glimmer tied off the filament, then dropped down to the ground to catch her breath. She looked old, and it occurred to Harrison for the first time that she might indeed be old.
"What just happened?" he asked.
"Voyeur."
That didn't sound like an answer. "I'm sorry, come again?"
"Somebody's avatar. A fucking voyeur." She was shaking.
This was all lost on him. "That thing you wiped on your pants?"
"That thing I wiped on my pants," she began, "was a spy. It was spying on you. It has likely been spying on you for a very long time, and come tomorrow, it will likely be replaced."
Harrison tried to take this in. "A spy? Who would spy on me? What's worth spying on about me?" Desperate, confused, he waited for answers. When an answer finally came, it was not in response to any of his questions.
Still shivering, she said quietly, "This trip isn't what you think it is."
Chapter Nine
Worm
Harrison got no sleep that night. He spent most of the night interrogating Glimmer and found every scrap of information he could glean from her to be less reassuring than the last. The glowing snot on Glimmer's pants, it turned out, was the remains of a magical creature, not entirely unlike a pixie (much more like a faerie, she insisted). It was sentient, after a fashion, but not autonomous. These creatures were linked
directly to the being that created them, transmitting all the sensory information they experienced. This was what she had meant by someone's avatar. The circle, she explained, had been to shield them from any further intrusion, but it would only buy them a few hours. Technology was alien to the world Glimmer had come from and appeared to be incompatible with magic. Another avatar, if one were dispatched to them before sunup, would not be able to see into the circle of tech they had created. With luck, it would look for them there, not find them, and move on, perhaps giving them enough time to change course and avoid detection altogether. He was surprised to hear her share this intelligence with such candor. He had come to expect her to tease him about everything. That she was so forthcoming now must mean that she was truly shaken.
In addition to their small size, these creatures were invisible and inaudible at will, making them perfect spies, which was pretty much all they were ever used for. Because of this, they were referred to as keyholes, spyglasses, and other labels of that nature. Often they were simply called bugs, in two senses of the word.
"Why did you call that one a voyeur?" Harrison asked at one point, still trying to get a bead on what it was called, what it was.
"The spying they do?" replied Glimmer. "Lurking? Watching?" She paused, perhaps uncertain how best to say it. "They get off on it."
After that, he stopped asking questions for a while.
Harrison's exceptional stroke of luck, in this case, was the fact that faeries and pixies were very closely related, in a magical sense, to the little spies. As a result, Glimmer had the rare ability not only to detect them but also render herself invisible to them.
The other, far more crucial information he obtained was the reason faeries and related beings had this unique connection to the avatars. Avatars were never created by noble creatures, or for noble causes, for a simple cost-benefit reason. The magic used to create one required the sacrifice of a living faerie.
Someone wanted to watch Harrison badly enough to murder for it.
As if that fact alone were not already enough to chill him beyond any rational response, something else she said, almost casually, disturbed him far more. Somehow, in the big picture of what had happened to the world, Harrison mattered. A lot. He wondered if she had known that. Her behavior implied that she had not.
They stayed up until dawn, sometimes talking, sometimes just pacing. Harrison could feel the fatigue working on his brain, but he couldn't bring himself to try to sleep. Glimmer assured him that he would be safe, at least long enough to catch a few hours of shuteye, but he didn't buy it.
The sun came up. Harrison packed up the remnants of their camp, and their journey continued.
* * *
For several days they tacked. Taking directional cues from the sun, they traveled northwest for half a day, then turned and moved southwest until sundown. Some days they started out southwest and then turned north. Once they spent three hours moving due east before starting the zigzag again. Glimmer hoped that randomizing their movements might help them avoid detection. Might.
Harrison suggested using the compass to find shelter and supplies, but Glimmer nixed this idea. Lingering remnants of civilization, she reasoned, were the most likely places that someone looking for them would investigate, and it would be short order before they'd be under scrutiny again, probably without their knowing it. Nevertheless, through sheer random distribution, buildings and artifacts cropped up in the travelers' path.
They came upon one such structure in a hilly forest. It was a building, but a very small one, not much bigger than a shed, with one glass door and no windows. It looked new. The exterior was painted bright white, and visible even from a distance was a large, stylized logo sign fixed above the door. It read, in garish blue letters, GLTW. The logo was punctuated with a small icon in the form of a curvy squiggle connected to a short vertical line. Harrison found the image familiar, but couldn't place where he had seen it before. The building was incongruous to its surroundings, but Harrison had long since acclimated to the fact that he now lived in a world where incongruity was the norm. Drawing nearer, he could see through the glass door that the small edifice was just an empty room. This made no sense until he got close enough to see that the room did include one important item: a functioning escalator. Going down.
"Well," he said. "My my my. Isn't that inviting." He had, of late, been developing what he considered to be a healthy paranoia, and this entrance to what was obviously some sort of underground lair had him on high alert.
"What's a gltw?" the pixie asked. She was wearing tights, purple at the waist and sheer black all the way down from there, and a multicolored jacket with sheer black sleeves. Around her neck, on a red, white and blue ribbon, hung a tiny plastic Olympic gold medal, with a white sticker on one side indicating that she had won it at the 2002 Winter Games. For the US team. Conspicuous by their absence from her naked feet were the small plastic figure skates that went with the outfit.
Harrison played her question over in his head several times before he realized that she was trying to pronounce the sign. He shook his head. "It's probably not a word," he said, patiently. "It's got to be an abbreviation for something."
"Oh," she said. She sounded disappointed. "An abbreviation for what?"
Harrison shrugged. "My first guess would be Obvious Trap of Certain Doom, but that doesn't have all the right letters." He thought for a moment. "How about Gratuitous Lure to Torture and Woe?"
He watched Glimmer study his face. "You don't trust this thing," she said. "What are you afraid of?"
"What's not to be afraid of? This is a door to some underground, I don't know, something. That can't be good. We're basically on the lam now, right? Do we really want to stroll into some bunker, possibly with only one entrance or exit, without knowing what's down there? Doesn't this just shout trap to you?"
"Actually," she said with care, "I was just thinking the exact opposite."
Harrison was nonplussed. "What? You think this is some kind of lucky-break sanctuary? Ride the escalator into the bowels of the earth, and all will be well? Why are we not already walking away from here?"
"It's not magic," she said.
This was not the response he had expected. It somehow sounded like an incomplete idea. "What's not?" he asked.
"The door. The room. The escalator. It's a real escalator."
"So what?"
She heaved a frustrated sigh. "Let's get on the same page here, Harry. So far, the only thing we know about whoever was watching you is that he's using magical tools. If you recall, technology blinds the spies he uses. This is technology. They're not going to be down there. They're also not going to come down after us. The escalator alone will be enough to throw them off our scent, and there's no telling what might be down there that we can use." She let him take that in. "It's worth checking out," she added, "and it's probably the safest place we could even be right now."
This gave Harrison pause. Glimmer had just offered more direct information in one breath than he had gotten from her in weeks. If what she said were true, and if she felt it significant enough to break from her difficult mischief act, this might be worth taking seriously. He looked at the entrance again. It still looked like bait. "You can't possibly think this is a good idea," he said.
"There's no one down there to fear," she persisted, "and we'll be invisible." They stared at each other for several long seconds. "I think," she admitted. More staring happened.
As the door sensed his proximity and opened itself to invite him in, Harrison hesitated, then stepped through. "I really hope this isn't my first opportunity to say I told you so."
"It won't be," she said cheerfully. "I'm pretty sure."
The escalator went down the equivalent of two floors and ended at a short, narrow corridor, which led to another escalator. For a moment, Harrison considered just turning around and getting back on the other side. The side that went up, and out, and far away. Momentum propelled him forward, however, and he foun
d himself going down about two more floors. This time, the escalator opened out onto a much wider passageway, which, in turn, led to a cavernous chamber.
It looked like a small, abandoned city.
The entire chamber was well lit but strangely colorless. Harrison could see maybe fifty small buildings laid out in rows. Wide walkways ran between them, a bit too narrow to be proper roads, but giving that impression nonetheless. On the ceiling, which was several stories above his head, Harrison saw a large, sort of trapezoidal solid that was suspended over what looked to be the center of the little faux town square. It was dark and smooth, and its purpose, if it had one, was not obvious. Everything looked remarkably clean, as though the entire place had been painstakingly constructed but never occupied. The main walls were tiled in a design Harrison wasn't quite sure he understood. Most of the tiles appeared to be ceramic, but interspersed among them were clusters of larger tiles that appeared to be black glass. The tiles themselves were still lustrous. Harrison looked for, but could not find, graffiti. Running across the top of one massive wall, in the same style and color he had seen on the door topside, were, again, the letters GLTW. He looked at them curiously, then looked at the opposite wall and saw the letters again. "Welcome to Gltw," he said under his breath. He found himself unsatisfied with his pronunciation and envied Glimmer's ingenuous ability to read it naturally.
Most of the structures appeared, at first glance, to be storefronts. When he went in to inspect them, he discovered that they were stores. "Some kind of mall?" he wondered aloud, but almost none of the shops seemed to carry clothing, which was inconsistent with his mall schema. Most of them turned out to be designed for convenience items or knickknacks. He found a newsstand (without a single periodical on display), a drug store (where he traded in his somewhat depleted first aid kit for a fully stocked one), a bookstore, and more shops of that nature. He recognized some brand names (and helped himself to a bag of Cheetos at the drug store), but most he did not. His sense was that these businesses were not from his time.
