by Neil Gaiman
“You’ll grow into it,” she said. “I did.”
She got up and walked over to the percolator, and poured herself a cup of coffee.
“You know what makes it worse,” she said suddenly, urgently, as if we had been arguing about something and now she was coming back with the kicker, “what makes it worse isn’t worrying about whether or not you’ve gone crazy or you’re lying to me or any of that nonsense. Because you aren’t lying to me. I mean, I’ve known you for a very long time, Joey. I know what you do when you lie. You’re not lying.” She took a swig of her coffee. “And you aren’t crazy. I’ve known crazy people. And you aren’t one of them.”
She pulled another cigarette out of the pack, but, instead of lighting it, she began to take it apart while she talked, peeling off the paper, pulling out the tobacco, inch by inch, stripping it down to paper and tobacco and filter, all in a neat pile in the ashtray.
“So, my little boy is going to war. Obviously I’m not the first mother in history this has happened to. And from what you’re saying, I’m not even the first—the first me this has happened to. But what makes it worse is that from the moment that you walk through that door, you’re dead to me. Because you’re never coming back. Because if you . . . if you get killed, rescuing your friends or fighting the enemy or in your In-Between World . . . I’ll never know.
“The Spartan mothers used to say, ‘Come back with your shield or on it.’ But you’re on your way, and I’ll never see you again, shield or no shield. No one’s ever going to send me a medal or a—what do they do, now that they don’t send telegrams?—or a message, saying ‘Dear Mrs. Harker, we regret to inform you that Joey died like a . . . died like a . . .’”
I thought she was going to cry, but she took a deep breath and just sat there for a bit.
“You’re letting me go?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I spent my life hoping I would have kids who would be able to tell the difference between right and wrong. Who, when the decisions, the big decisions, need to be made, would do the right thing. I believe you, Joey. And you’re doing the right thing. How could I ever stop you now?
“Wherever you go. Whatever happens to you. Know this, Joey. I love you, I’ll always love you, and I think . . . I know you’re doing the right thing. It just . . . hurts, that’s all.”
Then she hugged me. My face was wet, and I don’t know if they were her tears or my own.
“We’ll never see each other again, will we?” asked my mom.
I shook my head.
“Here,” she said. “I made it for you. It’s a good-bye thing. I’m not sure what else I can give you.” And she pulled a little stone on a chain from her pocket. It looked black and then, when it caught the light, it glinted blue and green like a starling’s wing. She fastened it about my neck.
“Thanks,” I said. “It’s lovely.” And then I said, “I’ll miss you.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “It gave me something to do.” And then she said, “I’ll miss you, too. Come back, if you can. When you’ve saved the universe.”
I nodded. “Will you tell Dad?” I asked. “Tell him I love him. And that he’s been the best dad anyone could hope for.”
She nodded. “I’ll tell him. I could wake him up, if you like . . . ?”
I shook my head. “I have to go,” I told her.
“I’ll wait here,” she said. “For a bit. In case you come back.”
“I won’t,” I told her.
“I know you won’t,” she said. “But I’ll wait.”
I went out into the night.
It was below freezing outside. I slipped into the mind-set that had supposedly been scoured from my head, and started casting about for a potential portal.
I hoped there would be one nearby—I didn’t like the notion of having to walk (without a capital W) very far in this weather. I can’t just open a portal to the In-Between anywhere I feel like. I wish I could. But it doesn’t work that way. Certain transdimensional points of space-time have to be congruent, and these come and go. It’s like catching a cab—if you’re lucky one might stop for you outside your house, but it’s more likely you’ll have to hike a bit, maybe even as far as the nearest hotel or restaurant where there’s a taxi stand. There are places where you’re more likely to find potential portals. Unfortunately, they’re not always near restaurants or hotels.
It may sound strange, but I didn’t let myself think about that conversation with Mom. There were just too many surprises to deal with—I could feel the fuses in my mind threatening to blow every time I came close to thinking of it. I concentrated instead on finding a portal.
I didn’t feel the faint tingle in my head that usually indicates there’s one nearby, so I started trotting down the street, my breathing puffing out in clouds as I went. I found myself wondering what the soap bubbles I’d been blowing earlier for the squid would do in subzero weather.
A moment later I found out—sort of.
Hue came swooping out of the night and hovered before me. He pulsed an urgent spectrum at me: green, orange, yellow, pearl. It occurred to me that maybe his patterning was even more complex than I had assumed it was—that instead of being a symptom of basic emotional states it was actually a language. Because he certainly seemed to be trying to tell me something now.
When he was sure he had my attention, he scooted off, pausing now and then to make sure I was following. Which I was. We stopped in a tiny park—practically nothing more than a lawn without a house behind it—about six blocks from my house. Hue seemed to be waiting for me.
I knew what he wanted. I cast about for the nascent portal I knew would be here. And found it.
I looked up at Hue, floating there patiently. “Thanks, buddy,” I said. And I fitted my mind into that transdimensional congruency like a key into a lock, and opened that lock and swung the door wide.
Beyond was a shifting, rickety landscape that looked like a Doctor Strange comic book. I squared my shoulders, took a last look around, drew a deep breath—
and went for a Walk.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HUE WAS NOWHERE TO be seen when I got into the In-Between, which made me feel kind of relieved, to be honest.
Don’t get me wrong; I was grateful to the little guy. But if I’d never met him . . . well, my life would sure have been a heck of a lot simpler. Jay would still be alive, for one thing. And maybe I’d still be happy and at home with my family and not off trying to save the Multiverse, or whatever it was that I was trying to do.
I stood on a rock that felt the way that fresh oregano smells and that tumbled through the madness of the In-Between in a crashing arpeggio of double-bass music. I rode it like a surfer rides a board, and I thought about where I should go from here.
I said I remembered everything, but that wasn’t quite true. I remembered almost everything. But, rummage around in my head as much as I wanted, I couldn’t find the key that would let me go back to Base Town. (There was something . . . some way . . . but it was as elusive as the shape of a hole in your tooth after it had been filled or the name of a man you knew that definitely began with S—if it didn’t begin with L or V or W. It was gone. Which makes sense, I guess—of all my memories, the key to InterWorld Prime would be the biggest secret to keep.)
Meanwhile, in the back of my head, a voice like gas wheezing through honey was saying, “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. . . .”
Lord Dogknife’s words had meant nothing when I had heard them originally, coming from the mouth of Scarabus—they had just been one more thing among entirely too many things that I didn’t understand. But now, in the light of ever
ything that had occurred, they made perfect—and horrifying—sense.
Phantom gateways, leading to notional shadow realms. Yes.
Shadow realms, like the one that six kids, heading out to find three beacons on a training mission, wound up in. We thought we were going to one of the Lorimare worlds, and instead we wound up in a shadow dimension. The concept had been touched on as a theoretical possibility in one of the classes at Base Town: They were also known as “oxbow worlds,” named after the oddly shaped lakes that were sometimes left when a meandering river cuts off a section of itself. Think of the river as a time stream and the oxbow lake as a slice of reality that’s somehow been pinched off, doomed to run an endless loop of existence, over and over. It might be anywhere from a few seconds to years, even centuries. The point is that it’s sealed off from the rest of the Altiverse, no more detectable or accessible than the theoretical universe inside a black hole.
If Lord Dogknife’s sorcerers had somehow managed to open a way to one of these shadow dimensions, they could put a seeming spell on it, make it look like whatever they wanted it to—and then drop us out of it and into one of the HEX worlds. Which was exactly what they’d done. There had been no way for us to detect the trick, either by instrumentation or by Walking. The perfect trap.
But, once opened, that shadow realm was no longer inaccessible. I still remembered how to get there.
I couldn’t go back to InterWorld. I didn’t have that knowledge. Okay, fine.
It didn’t mean I couldn’t start looking for my friends.
I envisioned the coordinates that had taken us into the trap, and, gently, I nudged them open with my mind.
A huge, egglike door dilated several yards in front of me with a low bitter-chocolate-scented screech.
I didn’t go through it. I just watched and waited. After a moment, the door closed once more, and then it shrank to nothing and vanished. Where the door had been, however, was a dark place like a shadow that rippled and flapped like a flag in a thunderstorm.
That was the trapdoor. That was the portal that led to the shadow dimension where they’d taken my team.
That was where I was going.
I Walked toward the shadow door. Before I could enter, however, something was suddenly in the way, bobbing and hanging in space. It was a balloon the size of a large cat, and it was blocking my way.
“Hue,” I said.
Bottle green and neon pink flickered across its surface, as if in warning.
“Hue, I have to go through there.”
Hue’s surface changed, pushed and pulled, and I was looking at something that resembled a balloon caricature of Lady Indigo. Then the image sproinged back into a balloon.
“I couldn’t get back there before because you were stopping me, weren’t you?”
A deep affirmative vermilion.
“Look, I have to get back there. They may have died a long time ago, or they may have only been put into chains five minutes ago—you know how screwy time can get when you go from world to world—especially these shadow dimensions. But they were my people. And I took them there. The least I can do is get them out—or die trying.”
He contracted, as if he were thinking. Then he drifted upward and out of my way. He looked a little sad.
“But, hey, if you want to come with me—well, a friend is always good to have around.”
Hue ran through a set of bright colors I don’t think you can see outside of the In-Between and purposefully bounced down to me. He hovered over my left shoulder.
Together we stepped into the shadow.
I was cold then, for a moment, like stepping into a river on a warm day, and then the world shimmered and re-formed.
I was up on the roof, in a world which looked like something out of The Jetsons. And then Hue floated in front of my face, forming himself into a kind of large lens. I looked at the world through the huge bubbly mudluff, and saw . . .
. . . a gray sky. Saw that I was standing on the turret of a sad-looking castle. The whole place felt like an empty stage set, no longer in use. I couldn’t see anyone anywhere around.
“Okay,” I said to Hue. “Let’s go find the dungeons.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THIS IS HOW TO find dungeons, if you ever have friends in durance vile in a castle somewhere:
Try to keep out of sight. Find the back stairs. Then just keep going down until there isn’t any more down to go, to where the corridors are narrow and smell of damp and mildew, and it’s dark enough that, without the weird light that goes with you (if you’re lucky enough to have a mudluff coming along) you can’t see a thing. When you get to that place, I guarantee the dungeons are just around the corner.
The castle was more or less deserted. I ducked out of sight when I heard footsteps at the other end of a corridor, but that was all. And the people going past looked more like movers: They wore white overalls and were carrying chairs and lamps away with them. They looked like they were closing the place down.
I found the dungeons in about twenty minutes, no problem.
Well, one small problem—they were empty.
There were nine cells, nine windowless holes in living rock, with heavy iron doors that were solid save for small barred windows. All of them were empty. The only sounds were the skitter and chitter of rats and the dripping of water on mossy stones. I took a chance and shouted their names: “Jai! Jo! Josef!” But there was no reply.
I sat down on the stones of the dungeon floor. I’m not ashamed to say I had tears in my eyes. Hue flooped from around me and bobbed in the air beside me, patches of glow moving across his surface.
I said, “I’m too late, Hue. They’re probably all dead by now. Either they got boiled down like the HEX people said, or they died of old age waiting for me to come back. And it was . . .” I was going to say my fault, but I wasn’t sure that it was, really.
Hue was trying to attract my attention. He was floating in front of my face, extruding little multicolored psuedopods.
“Hue,” I said, “you’ve helped a lot so far. But I think we’ve come as far as we can now.”
An irritated crimson blush crossed the little mudluff’s bubble surface.
“Look,” I said. “I’ve lost them! What are you going to do? Tell me where they are?”
Hue’s surface shimmered, and then became whirls and clusters of stars in a night sky above and below. It was a place I recognized. Jay and Lady Indigo had called it the Nowhere-at-All. The Binary people called it the Static. By those or any other names, it was the fringe area of the In-Between, the long route for traveling between the planes.
“Well, even if that’s where they are,” I said, “there’s no way I can follow them there.”
But Jay’d followed me, hadn’t he? He got me off the Lacrimae Mundi.
It could be done, then.
But I didn’t know how to do it. I could only Walk through the In-Between itself. To reach the Nowhere-at-All would require knowledge of a whole different set of multidimensional coordinates, from someone familiar with those levels of reality—
I looked up. “Hue?” I said.
The mudluff moved away from me, slowly, foot after foot, until he was at the end of the dank corridor. And then he came barreling toward me, faster than a flowerpot falling from a window ledge, and even though I knew what he was going to do, I couldn’t help flinching back as he filled my vision and there was a—
poppp!
—and my world imploded into stars.
The mudluff was nowhere to be seen. Instead, everything felt very familiar. I got that déjà vu feeling of I’ve been here before, but of course I hadn’t: Last time I was falling through the Nowhere-at-All Jay was falling beside me, and we were falling away from the Lacrimae Mundi.
Now the wind between the worlds was whipping at my face and tearing my eyes; and the stars (or whatever they are, out in the Nowhere-at-All) were blurring past; and I was flailing, terrified at the emptiness of nothing but more terrified still beca
use now I wasn’t falling away from anything.
I was falling toward something.
Imagine a doughnut or an inner tube—your basic toroidal shape. Paint it with something black and kind of slimy. Now take five of these and twist and turn and meld them together like those balloon thingies street artists sometimes do for kids—although I think that if you made one that looked like this for a kid, he’d start crying and not stop. Still with me? Now make the whole thing the size of a supertanker. Last, cover every curving surface of what you now have, which is a big black tubular evil thing, with derricks and towers and machicolated walls and ballistae and cannons and gargoyles and . . .
Get the idea?
This was not something you wanted to be falling toward. Trust me. It was something you wanted to be falling away from, as fast as possible.
But I didn’t have a choice.
I squinted my eyes against the wind. There were two or three dozen smaller ships—galleons, like the Lacrimae Mundi, and ships smaller and faster than her—arranged around the big black thing. They looked like ducks escorting a whale.
I knew I was looking at Lord Dogknife’s attack armada and dreadnought. It was the only thing it could be. They were beginning the assault on the Lorimare worlds.
I had finally found where my friends were being held prisoner—assuming they hadn’t already been reduced to Walker soup. The problem was that in a minute or so I was going to hit it like a melon dropped from a skyscraper, and there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it. The Nowhere-at-All isn’t outer space. It has air and something like gravity. If I hit the ship, I was dead. If I missed—and I had about as much chance of that as an ant missing a football field—I’d keep falling forever, unless I could open a portal into the In-Between, and there was no guarantee of that. I’d only made it last time because Jay was with me.
What would Jay do? I asked myself.
I thought you’d never ask, said a voice in the back of my head. It sounded like my voice, only a decade older and infinitely wiser. It wasn’t Jay or his ghost or anything like that. It was just me, I guess, finding a voice that I’d listen to.
