InterWorld

by Neil Gaiman

She nodded. “Very well,” she said. “One moment.” She went through the door to the little pink bathroom and closed the door behind her.

  The tattooed man looked at me. “You sad little creature,” he said. “Like a lamb to the slaughter.”

  The Lady Indigo had not told me to speak, so I said nothing.

  There was a tapping on the cabin door. Scarabus opened it. I couldn’t see what happened next, because the door blocked my view. But there was a thud, and a gasp, and Scarabus collapsed to the floor. The man who came in was wearing a hat and a coat and a silver face.

  He raised a hand to greet me. Then he stripped off his raincoat and his hat. He was covered from head to foot in a silver suit of some kind, like a man wearing a mirror. He rolled the unconscious Scarabus behind the bed and put the coat over him.

  I could hear the sink running. I knew that my Lady Indigo was washing her hands with the pink rose-smelling soap. I had to warn her that the Jay man was there and that he meant her harm. I tried to speak, but she hadn’t given me permission to talk, and so the words would not come.

  Jay—if that was who the man in the mirror suit was—raised a hand to the suit and adjusted something above his heart.

  The suit flowed and changed and . . .

  Scarabus standing there in front of me. If I hadn’t been able to see the real tattooed man’s foot peeping out from under the coat on the other side of the bed, I would have thought Jay really was him. The illusion was that good.

  My Lady Indigo came out of the bathroom.

  Tell me to speak, I thought, pleading with her, tell me to speak, and I will tell you you’re in danger. This is not your friend. I am the only person who truly cares about you, and I cannot warn you.

  “Right,” she said. “Let’s go up on deck. How’s your headache?”

  The man who looked like Scarabus shrugged. I guessed that the suit didn’t work for voices. Lady Indigo didn’t press the point. She turned and went out of the room. “Follow me, slave Harker, and stay close,” she called.

  I followed her up onto the deck. I couldn’t even begin to imagine not doing so. (The Joey buried deep inside me could—he kept on yelling and screaming that I should resist, run, anything. I kept walking. His words meant nothing.)

  Above us star fields spun and blinked and whorled. Neville the jelly man hurried over as soon as he spotted us.

  “I’ve checked all the instruments and portents,” he said self-importantly, in his sucking-mud voice, “and consulted the astrolabe, and they are all quite certain. We are carrying a stowaway. Some presence arrived on the Lacrimae Mundi about an hour ago. Just when I said I felt something in the pit of my stomach.”

  “And a mighty stomach it is, too,” said the mirror man pretending to be Scarabus in Scarabus’s voice. I was wrong, then; the suit could do voices, too.

  “I shall ignore that comment,” said the jelly man to Scarabus.

  “What kind of stowaway, Neville?” asked Lady Indigo.

  “Could be one of Graceful Zelda’s people trying to grab the Harker, so they can take all the credit,” said Scarabus. “You know how much she hates you. If she took your Harker back to HEX, it would make her look very good.”

  “Zelda.” Lady Indigo made a face, as if she’d bitten into something that had turned out to be mostly maggots.

  Neville hugged himself with his jellyfish hands and looked miserable. “She wants my skin,” he said. “Has for years. Wants a coat, Zelda does, one that’ll let her show off and still be warm.”

  Before he could continue, Scarabus—Jay pretending to be Scarabus—looked at me and squinted. “My lady,” he said, “how do you know this is still your Harker? What if it’s some kind of changeling? They could have already stolen the boy away and left something behind that only looks like him. Some kind of spell creature, perhaps. Easy enough to do, even here.”

  Lady Indigo frowned and looked at me. Then she gestured in the air with one hand while she sang three clear notes. “Now,” she said, “any spell that is on or around you is removed. Let us see what you truly are.”

  I realized that I could speak again if I wanted to.

  I could do anything I wanted to now.

  I was back in charge, and, boy, did it feel good to be back.

  “Right, Joey,” said the Scarabus imposter, his face and body flowing back into silver.

  “Jay? Is that you?”

  “Of course it’s me! Come on!” He picked me up in a fireman’s carry and ran.

  We made it almost to the rail when there was a small green explosion, like a firecracker going off, and Jay made a noise of pain. I shifted my head, stared at his opposite shoulder. The mirror stuff covering it was seared and gone, exposing a mass of circuitry and skin, and most of the skin was bleeding. I could see the bizarre, distorted images of Lady Indigo, Neville and Scarabus reflected from his back.

  He dropped me.

  We were up against the edge of the ship. On the other side of the bulwark was . . . nothing. Just stars and moons and galaxies, going on forever.

  Lady Indigo raised her hand. A small bead of green fire hung in her palm.

  Neville had a huge, nasty-looking sword in one hand. I don’t know where it came from, but it glistened and jiggled just like his skin. He started walking toward us.

  I heard something above us and looked up. The rigging was filled with sailors, and the sailors all had knives.

  Things were definitely not looking good.

  I heard a clattering on the deck. “Don’t shoot them, my lady! Hold your fire!” The real Scarabus stumbled up from below.

  He seemed like an unlikely saviour.

  “Please,” he said. “Let me. This calls for something special.” He extended one tattoo-covered arm at us and moved his other hand toward his bicep. There was a blurry image of a huge serpent curled around his upper arm. I was pretty sure that if he touched that tattoo, the snake would be real, and big—and undoubtedly hungry.

  There was only one thing left to do, so we did it.

  We jumped.

  INTERLOG 2

  From Jay’s Journal

  Looking back on it, I made a couple of seriously wrong calls. The wrongest was deciding to meet the new kid outside his parents’ house in the new world that he’d slipped into.

  I was hoping that he wouldn’t start Walking before I got to him. But hope pays no dividends, as the Old Man says. (“Hope when you’ve got nothing else,” he once told us. “But if you’ve got anything else, then for Heaven’s sake, DO it!”) And Joey had already started Walking.

  Not far. He’d done what most new Walkers do—slipped into a world he wasn’t in. It’s harder to Walk into a world in which “you” exist already: It’s like identical magnetic poles repelling. He needed an out, and so he slipped into a world in which he wasn’t.

  Which meant that it took me an extra forty minutes to locate him, Walking from plane to plane. Finally I tracked him—he was on a crosstown bus, headed home. Or what he thought was home.

  And I waited outside his home. I suppose I figured that he’d be more amenable to reason once he saw what was waiting for him in there.

  But, as the Old Man pointed out that morning, he must have tripped every alarm in creation when he started Walking.

  And he was in no state to be talked to when he came out of that house. Which meant we were sitting ducks for the Binary retiarii on their Gravitrons, waving their nets around.

  Given the alternatives, I don’t know which I hate worse: the Binary or the HEX folk.

  HEX boils young Walkers down to their essences. I mean that literally—they put us in huge pots, like in those cannibal cartoons you used to see in the back of newspapers, and surround it with a web of spells and wards. Then they boil us down to nothing but our essence—our souls, if you will—which they force into glass pots. And they use those glass pots to power their ships and any multiworld traveling they do.

  The Binary treat Walkers differently, but no better. They chill us to negat
ive 273º, a hair above absolute zero, hang us from meat hooks, then seal us in these huge hangars on their homeworld, with pipes and wires going into the back of our heads, and keep us there, not quite dead but a long, long way from alive, while they drain our energy and use it to power their interplane travel.

  If it’s possible to hate two organizations exactly the same, then that’s how much I hate them.

  So Joey did the smart thing—unconsciously, but it was still smart—when the Binary goons showed up. He Walked between worlds again.

  I took out the three retiarii without any trouble.

  Then I had to find him again. And if I’d thought it hard the first time . . . well, this time he’d charged blindly through the Altiverse, ripping his way through hundreds of probability layers as if they were tissue paper. Like a bull going through a china shop—or a couple of thousand identical china shops.

  So I started after him. Again.

  It’s strange. I’d forgotten how much I hated these newer Greenvilles. The Greenville I grew up in still had drive-in burger bars with waitresses on roller skates, black-and-white TV and the Green Hornet on the radio. These Greenvilles had mini satellite dishes on the roofs of the houses and people driving cars that looked like giant eggs or like jeeps on steroids. No fins among the lot of them. They had color TVs and video games and home theaters and the Internet. What they didn’t have any more was a town. And they hadn’t even noticed its passing.

  I hit a fairly distant Greenville, and finally I felt him like a flare in my mind. I Walked toward him. And saw a HEX ship, all billowing sails and hokey rigging, fading out into the Nowhere-at-All.

  I’d lost him. Again. Probably for good this time.

  I sat down on the football field and thought hard.

  I had two options. One was easy. One was going to be a son of a bitch.

  I could go back and tell the Old Man that I’d failed. That HEX had captured a Joseph Harker who had more worldwalking power than any ten Walkers put together. That it wasn’t my fault. And we’d let the matter drop there. Maybe he’d chew me out, maybe he wouldn’t, but I knew that he knew that I’d rake myself over the coals for this one harder and longer than he ever could. Easy.

  Or I could try the impossible. It’s a long way back to HEX in one of those galleons. I could try to find Joey Harker and his captors in the Nowhere-at-All. It’s the kind of thing we joke about, back at base. No one’s ever done it. No one ever could.

  I couldn’t face telling the Old Man I’d screwed up. It was easier to try the impossible.

  So I did.

  I Walked into the Nowhere-at-All. And I discovered something none of us knew: Those ships leave a wake. It’s almost a pattern, or a disturbance, in the star fields they fly through. It’s very faint, and only a Walker could sense it.

  I had to let the Old Man know about this. This was important. I wondered if the Binary saucers left trails you could follow through the Static.

  The only thing we at InterWorld have going for us is this: We can get there long before they can. What takes them hours or days or weeks of travel through the Static or through the Nowhere-at-All, we can do in seconds or minutes, via the In-Between.

  I blessed the encounter suit, which minimized the windburn and the cold. Not to mention protected me from the retiarii nets.

  I could see the ship in the distance, HEX flags fluttering in the nothingness. I could feel Joey burning like a beacon in my mind. Poor kid. I wondered if he knew what was in store for him if I failed.

  I landed on the ship from below and behind, holding on between the rudder and the side of the stern. I waited for a while. They’d have at least a couple of world-class magicians on the ship, and, though the encounter suit would mask me to some extent, it wouldn’t hide the fact that something had changed. I gave them time enough to hunt through the ship and find nothing. Then I went in through a porthole and followed the trail to where they were keeping the kid.

  I’m recording this in the In-Between on the way back to base. It’ll make debriefing quicker and easier tomorrow.

  Memo to the Old Man: I want both days off when this is done. I deserve them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WELL, TO BE 100 percent truthful about it, “we” didn’t really jump. Jay jumped, and he was holding onto my windbreaker, so I didn’t really have a lot of choice. My exit was more in the tradition of the Three Stooges than Errol Flynn. I probably would have broken my neck when we landed.

  Except we didn’t land.

  There was no place to land. We just kept falling. I looked down and could glimpse stars shining through the thin mists below us. A green firecracker explosion happened off to the left of us, buffeting us and knocking us to the right, but it was too far away to do any damage. Above us, the ship swiftly shrank to the size of a bottle cap and then vanished in the darkness above. And Jay and I hurtled into the darkness below.

  You know how skydivers rhapsodize about free fall being like flying? I realized then that they had to be lying. It feels like falling. The wind screams past your ears, rushes into your mouth and up your nose, and you have no doubt whatsoever that you’re falling to your death. There’s a reason it’s called “terminal velocity.”

  This wasn’t a parachute jump, and we weren’t near Earth or any other planet I could see, but we were definitely falling down, down, down. We must have fallen a good five minutes when Jay finally grabbed my shoulders and wrestled me around so that my ear was next to his mouth. He shouted something, but even with his lips only an inch or so from my ear I couldn’t understand him.

  “What?” I screamed back.

  He pulled me closer still and shouted, “There’s a portal below us! Walk!”

  The first and last time I’d tried to walk on air I was five—I’d strolled blithely off the edge of a six-foot-high cinderblock wall and gotten a broken collarbone for my efforts. They say a cat that walks on a hot stove will never walk on a cold one, and I guess there’s some truth in that—certainly I never again tried to grow wings.

  Until now. Now I didn’t really have a choice.

  Jay obviously could tell what I was thinking. “Walk, brother, or we’ll fall through the Nowhere-at-All until the wind strips the flesh from our bones! Walk! Not with your legs—with your mind!”

  I had no more idea of how to do what he was telling me than a bullfrog knows how to croak the Nutcracker Suite. But he was surely right about one thing—there didn’t seem to be any other way out of our predicament. So I took a deep breath and tried to focus my mind.

  It didn’t help that I had no idea what I was trying to focus on. “Walk!” Jay had commanded me. But in order to walk I needed something solid to walk on. So that’s what I concentrated on—my feet treading solid ground.

  At first nothing changed. Then I noticed that the screaming wind hitting us from below was lessening. At the same time the mist was thickening. I couldn’t see the stars beneath us anymore. And there was a strange luminescence that seemed to come from the mist that now surrounded us.

  We were floating more than falling now. It was like falling in a dream, and it came as no surprise to either of us when we touched down on what seemed to be a cloud.

  I suppose Jay had done stranger stuff than this before, and that was why he took it in stride, so to speak. As for me, I had just reached a saturation point, that was all. Considering what I’d been through today, I’d finally come to the conclusion that this was probably all going on between my ears, that I’d somehow fried my brain’s motherboard and that I was probably at that moment wearing a wraparound canvas jacket with padlocks for buttons. Most likely they had me up in the sanitarium at Rook’s Bay, sitting in a very soft room and eating very soft food. A pretty depressing prospect, but it did have an upside—nothing could surprise me anymore.

  Which thought gave me a little comfort for about two more minutes—and then the mists thinned out completely, and I saw where we were.

  I’d gotten a glimpse of this—place? condition? st
ate of mind?—back when Jay had come through that slit in the air to meet me. This was the same, only this time he and I were in the middle of it.

  “Well done, Joey,” said Jay. “You got us here. You did it.”

  I stared, turning slowly. There was a lot to see.

  We were no longer on a cloud. I stood on a purple pathway that snaked, apparently unsupported, off into . . . infinity. There was no horizon—wherever we were did not seem to have any boundaries—but there was no skyline either. The distance was simply lost in more distance. Jay stood next to me on a magenta strip that wound off in the same general direction; it sometimes passed under, sometimes over my path. The colors were vivid, and both paths had the sheen of dyed polyurethane.

  But that wasn’t all. Not by several decimal places.

  On eye level with me and about three feet away was a geometric shape, larger than my head, that pulsed and throbbed, presenting now five sides, now nine, now sixteen. I couldn’t have told you what it was made of any more than I could tell you why it was doing what it was doing. I suppose you could say it was made out of yellow, because that’s the color it was saturated with. I touched it, gingerly, with one finger. It had the texture of linoleum.

  I looked in another direction—and just had time to duck as a spinning something whizzed by me, skittering erratically as it dodged and weaved through the chaos around it. A moment later it splashed into a pool of what looked like mercury—except that it was the color of cinnamon, and the pool hung at a forty-five-degree angle to the strip I stood on. The waves and droplets of the splash slowed as they spread, ultimately freezing at the height of the splatter.

  This sort of stuff was going on all around us, nonstop. What looked like a stylized mouth opened up in midair not far from Jay, yawning wider and wider until its lips ultimately folded back and it swallowed itself. I looked down—beneath my feet the chaos continued. Geometric shapes rolled and tumbled, changing into different forms or merging into one another; colors pulsed; the air carried the scents of honey, turpentine, roses . . . it was like a 3-D collaboration between Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Jackson Pollock. With a liberal dose of Heironymus Bosch and the really cool old Warner Bros. cartoons thrown in for good measure.