by Neil Gaiman
And there were eyes in the middle of the darkness.
The darkness formed itself into a shape. It was a woman. Her hair was long and black. She had big lips, like it had been fashionable for movie stars to have back when I was a kid; she was small and kind of thin, and her eyes were so green she had to have been wearing contacts, except she wasn’t.
They looked like a cat’s eyes. I don’t mean they were shaped like cat’s eyes. I mean they looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird.
“Joseph Harker,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. Which was probably not the smartest thing I could’ve said, because then she laid a spell on me.
That’s the best way I can explain it. She moved her finger in the air so that it traced a figure—a symbol that looked a little bit Chinese and a little bit Egyptian—that hung glowing in the air after her finger finished moving, and she said something at the same time; and the word she said hung and vibrated and swam through the room; and the whole of it, word and gesture, filled my head; and I knew I had to follow her for all my life, wherever she went. I would follow her or die in the attempt.
The door opened. Two men came in. One was wearing just a rag, like a diaper around his middle. He was bald—in fact, as near as I could tell, he was completely hairless, and that, with the diaper, made him look like a bad dream even without the tattoos. The tats just made it worse: They covered every inch of his skin from hairline to toenails; he was all faded blues and greens and reds and blacks, picture after picture. I couldn’t see what they were, even though he wasn’t more than five feet away.
The other man was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The T-shirt was a size too small, which was really too bad, because it left a big stretch of stomach exposed. And his stomach . . . well, it glistened. Like a jellyfish. I could see bones and nerves and things through his jelly skin. I looked at his face, and it was the same way. His skin was like an oil slick over his bones, muscles and tendons; you could see them, wavery and distorted, beneath it.
The woman looked at them as if she’d been expecting them. She gestured casually at me. “Got him,” she said. “Like taking ambrosia from an elemental. Easy. He’ll follow us anywhere now.”
Mr. Dimas stood up and said, “Now, listen here, young lady. You people can’t—” and then she made another gesture and he froze. Or kind of. I could see his muscles trembling, as if he were trying to move, trying with every cell of his being, and still failing.
“Where’s the pickup?” she asked. She had a kind of Valley Girl accent, which I found irritating, particularly since I knew I was going to have to spend the rest of my life following her around.
“Outside. There’s a blasted oak,” said the jellyfish man in a voice like belching mud. “They’ll take us from there.”
“Good,” she said. Then she looked at me. “Come along,” she told me in a voice that sounded like she was talking to a dog she didn’t particularly like. She turned and walked away.
Blindly, obediently, I followed her, hating myself with every step.
INTERLOG
From Jay’s Journal
I’d got back to Base Town late at night. Most of the folk in my dorm were asleep, except Jai, and he was meditating, suspended in midair with his legs crossed, so he might as well have been sleeping. I crept around, undressed and showered for twenty minutes, getting the mud and dried blood out of my hair. Then I filled out the damage & loss report, explaining how I’d lost my jacket and belt (I traded the jacket for information, and the belt had made a pretty effective tourniquet, if you must know). Then I crashed like a dead man and slept till I woke.
It’s a tradition. You don’t wake a guy when he gets back from a job. He gets a day to debrief, and then a day to himself. It’s kind of sacrosanct. But sacrosanct goes out the window when the Old Man calls, and there was a note beside my bunk when I awoke, on the Old Man’s orange paper, telling me to report to his office at my convenience, which is his way of saying immediately.
I pulled on my gear and I headed for the commander’s office.
There are five hundred of us on the base, and every single one of us would die for the Old Man. Not that he’d want us to. He needs us. We need us.
I knew he was in a foul mood when I reached the anteroom. His assistant waved me into his office as soon as she saw me coming. No “hello,” not even an offer of coffee. Just “He’s waiting. Go on in.”
The Old Man’s desk takes up most of the room, and it’s covered with piles of paper and dog-eared folders held together with rubber bands. Heaven only knows how he finds anything on there.
On the wall behind him there’s a huge picture of something that looks kind of like a whirlpool and kind of like a tornado and mostly like the shape the water makes as it goes down the drain. It’s an image of the Altiverse—the pattern that we all swore to protect and to guard and, if needed, to give our lives for.
He glared at me with his good eye. “Sit down, Jay.”
The Old Man looks to be in his fifties, but he could be much older than that. He’s pretty banged up. One of his eyes is artificial: it’s a Binary construct, made of metal and glass. Lights flicker inside it, green and violet and blue. When he looks at you through it, it can have you checking out your conscience and make you feel five years old every bit as well as his real eye can. His real eye is brown, just like mine.
“You’re late,” he growled.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I came as soon as I got your message.”
“We have a new Walker,” he told me. He picked up a file from his desk, riffled through it and pulled out a sheet of blue paper. He passed it to me. “Upstairs thinks he could be hot.”
“How hot?”
“Not sure. But he’s a wild card. Going to be setting off alarms and tripping snares everywhere he goes.”
I looked at the paper. Basic human-friendly planet design—one of the middle worlds, the thick part of the Arc—nothing too exotic. The coordinates were pretty straightforward as well. It looked like a fairly easy run.
“Reel him in?”
The Old Man nodded. “Yeah. And quickly. They’ll both be sending out grab teams to get him as soon as they know he’s out there.”
“I’m meant to be debriefing the Starlight job today.”
“Joliet and Joy are debriefing now. If I need any amplification I can get in touch with you. This takes priority. And you can have two days off when it’s done.”
I wondered if I’d actually get the two days off. It didn’t matter. “Got it. I’ll bring him in.”
“Dismissed,” said the Old Man. I stood up, figuring on a quick trip to the armory and then out into the field and into the In-Between. Before I reached the door, though, he spoke again. He was still growling at me, but it was a friendly growl. “Remember, Jay, I need you back here in one piece, and I need you back here soon. One more Walker, more or less, isn’t going to mean the end of the worlds. One less field officer might. Stay out of trouble. You’ll be back and debriefing by oh seven hundred hours tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and closed the door.
The Old Man’s assistant handed me my armory requisition slip. Then she smiled at me. Her name’s Josetta. “Goes for me, too, Jay,” she said. “Come back safe. We need all the field ops we can get.”
The quartermaster is from one of the heavier Earths—places where you feel like you weigh five hundred pounds, and often do. He’s shaped like a barrel, ten inches taller than I am. Looking at him is like looking into a distorting mirror at a carnival, the kind that squashes you as it magnifies you.
I requisitioned an encounter suit, watched him toss it down to me like it didn’t weigh anything at all. I caught it, and it almost knocked me over. It must have weighed seventy-five pounds. I figured he was mad at me for losing the combat jacket and the belt.
I signed for the encounter suit. I stripped down to my T-shirt and boxers, draped it over me and activated it, feeling it cover my body from head to toe; and then I set my m
ind on the new kid. I got a bead on him and began to Walk toward him. . . .
The In-Between was cold, and it tasted like vanilla and woodsmoke in my mouth. I found him without a hitch. And then it all went wrong.
CHAPTER FIVE
I WAS WALKING AFTER the witch, with Mr. Jellyfish and the tattooed man just behind me.
It was like two people were living in my head. One of them was ME, a big huge me, who had somehow decided that the most important thing there ever was or would be was the witch woman he was following out of the high school. The other person in my head was me, too, but a tiny little me who was screaming silently, who was terrified of the witch and the tattooed man and Mr. Jellyfish, who wanted to run, to save himself.
Trouble was, the little me was having no effect whatsoever. We crossed the football field, heading toward the old oak tree, which had been struck by lightning a couple of years back and now just stuck up into the sky like a rotten tooth. The sun had just gone down, but the sky was still light. I was shivering.
The witch turned to the tattooed man. “Scarabus, contact the transport.”
He bowed his head. I could see goose bumps on his skin under one of those not-quite-clear images. He raised a finger and touched it to one of the tattoos on his neck, and suddenly I could see that one clearly. It was a ship under sail. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the pupils were glowing gently.
“The ship Lacrimae Mundi at your bidding, lady,” he said in a distant voice like a radio broadcast.
“I have our quarry safely here. Bring her in, captain.”
“As you wish,” said the tattooed man, in the distant voice. Then he closed his eyes and took his hand off his tattoo; and when he opened his eyes, they were normal once more. “What’s the word?” he asked in his normal voice.
“They’re bringing her in now,” said the jellyfish man. “Look!”
I raised my head.
The ship—it seemed as big as the auditorium—that was materializing in the air in front of us looked like every pirate ship you’ve ever seen in old movies: stained wooden planks, big billowing sails, and a figurehead of a man with the head of a shark. It was gliding toward us about five feet above the ground, and the green grass of the football field tossed back and forth like the surface of the sea as it passed.
The big me couldn’t have cared less about ghost ships sailing through the air, as long as the witch lady and I were together. The little me that was trapped in the back of my head was sort of hoping that all this was just a bad reaction to some new medication the nice doctors were trying on me in whatever mental hospital they had me locked up in.
A rope ladder was thrown over the side of the ship.
“Climb!” said the witch woman, and I climbed.
When I was up over the side of the ship, huge hands grabbed me and dropped me on the deck like a sack of potatoes. I looked up to see men the size of wrestlers dressed like sailors in pirate movies. They had scarves tied around their heads and worn old sweaters and battered jeans, and were barefoot. They were more careful with the witch woman, lifting her carefully over the side of the ship. They all backed away then. I guessed that they didn’t want to touch the jellyfish man or Scarabus, the tattooed guy, and I couldn’t really blame them.
One of the sailors looked down at me. “Is that what all the fuss is about?” he asked. “That shrimp?”
“Yes,” said the witch woman coldly. “That shrimp is what all the fuss is about.”
“Lumme,” said the sailor. “Are we going to drop him overboard, then? Once we’re under way?”
“Hurt him before we get back to HEX and every warlock in the Tarn will want a little piece of your hide,” she told him. “He dies our way. What do you think powers this ship of yours, anyway? Take him down to my quarters.”
She turned to me. “Joseph, you need to go with this man. Stay where he tells you to stay. To do otherwise would make me very unhappy.”
The idea of hurting her made my heart ache. Literally—there was a stabbing pain inside me. I knew that I could never do anything to make her unhappy in any way. I would wait for her until the world ended if I had to.
The sailor showed me down a flight of steps into a narrow corridor that smelled like floor polish and fish. At the end of the corridor there was a door, and we opened it.
“Here we are, my fine shrimp,” he said. “The Lady Indigo’s quarters for the voyage back to HEX. You stand here and wait for her. If you need to relieve yourself, there’s a lavatory back there, through that door. Use it; don’t befoul yourself. She’ll be down when she’s ready. Got to chart our course back now, she does, with the captain.”
He was talking to me like you’d talk to a pet or a farm animal, just to hear the sound of his own voice.
He went out.
There was a lurching, then, and through the round cabin window I could see the evening sky dissolve into stars, thousands of them, floating in a violet blackness. We were moving.
I must have stood there for hours, waiting beside the door.
At one point I realized I needed to pee, and I went through the door that the sailor had pointed to. I suppose I expected something cramped and old-fashioned, but what waited behind the door was a small but luxurious bathroom with a large pink bathtub and a small pink-marble toilet. Which I used and flushed. I washed my hands with pink soap that smelled like roses and dried my hands on a fluffy pink bath towel.
Then I looked out the bathroom porthole.
Above the ship were stars. Below the ship the stars continued, shimmering points of light. There were more stars than I had ever imagined existed. And they were different. I didn’t recognize any of the constellations Dad had taught me when I was young. A lot of them were impossibly close—close enough to show disks as big as the sun, but somehow it was still night.
I wondered when we would get where we were going.
I wondered why they were going to have to kill me when we got there (and somewhere inside me a tiny Joey Harker screamed and yelled and sobbed and tried to get my body’s attention).
I hoped that the Lady Indigo hadn’t returned to find that I wasn’t waiting for her. The idea of disappointing her ripped through me like a knife in the heart, and I ran back to the doorway and stood at attention, hoping she would come back soon. If she didn’t come back, I was certain I would die.
I waited another twenty minutes or so, and then the door opened and happiness, pure and undiluted, flooded my soul. My Lady Indigo was here, with Scarabus.
She did not spare me a glance. She sat on the small pink bed, while the tattooed man stood in front of her.
“I don’t know,” she said to him, apparently responding to a question he had posed to her in the corridor. “I cannot imagine that anyone could find us here. And as soon as we reach HEX, there are guards and wards such as there are nowhere else in the Altiverse.”
“Still,” he said sulkily, “Neville said he picked up a disturbance in the continuum. He said something was coming.”
“Neville,” she said sweetly, “is a jelly-fleshed worrywart. The Lacrimae Mundi is sailing back to HEX through the Nowhere-at-All. We’re practically undetectable.”
“Practically,” he muttered.
She stood up and walked over to me. “How are you, Joseph Harker?”
“Very happy to see you back here, my lady,” I told her.
“Did anything unusual happen while you were down here waiting for me?”
“Unusual? I don’t think so.”
“Thank you, Joseph. You need not speak until next I tell you to.” She pursed her big lips and went back to sit on the bed again. “Scarabus, contact HEX for me.”
“Yes, my lady.”
He touched a tattoo on his stomach, a tattoo that looked a bit like something from the Arabian Nights, a bit like Dracula’s castle and a bit like the world seen from space. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, his pupils were flickering with light—not glowing steadily, as they had when he had s
ummoned the ship to the football field.
He spoke in a deep sort of voice then, the sort of voice you’d get if you dipped Darth Vader in a giant vat of maple syrup.
“Indigo? What is it?”
“We have the boy Harker, my lord Dogknife. A world-class Walker: He will power many ships.”
“Good,” said the syrupy wheeze. Even under whatever spell I was under, that voice made my skin crawl. “We are ready to begin the assault on the Lorimare worlds. The phantom gateways we will be creating will make a counterattack or rescue impossible. When they are empowered, the usual Lorimare coordinates will then open notional shadow realms under our control. Now, with another fine Harker at our disposal, we will have all the power we need to send in the fleet. The Imperator of the Lorimare worlds is already one of ours.”
“We have the Cause, Lord Dogknife.”
“We have the Will, Lady Indigo. How long until you dock here?”
“Twelve hours, no less.”
“Very well. I shall prepare a vat for the Harker.”
She looked at me and smiled, and my heart leapt up within me and sang like a cardinal in springtime.
“I would like to keep a souvenir of this Harker,” she said. “Perhaps a hank of his hair or a knucklebone.”
“I shall give orders to that effect. Now, good day,” and the tattooed man closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said in his own voice, “Ow. That left me with a killer headache. How was Dogknife?”
“Excellent,” she said. “He is planning our assault on the Lorimare worlds.”
“Better him than me,” said Scarabus, and he rubbed his temple. “Ow. I could do with a walk up on deck. Breath of fresh air.”
She nodded. “Yes. I’ve spent the last couple of hours down in the map room, breathing the captain’s meal of raw onions and goat cheese.” She looked at me. “But I don’t want to leave the Harker here.”
Scarabus shrugged his thin blue-and-red shoulders. “Bring him with.”
