by Tony Burgess
We tore into the task with great heart. I found myself enormously proud of my small, mysterious gang. Alex and Joost drew the vine out as far into the water as they could stand without being swept away. When Eric and I dragged the bed to within a few feet of the logs, the task became unbearable. Sadness had a weakening effect on us. I found myself distracted by sad moments from movies I’d seen. Old Yeller shot. Bambi’s mom shot. I didn’t know if I cried when I first saw these films, but as I remembered them, as I sobbed salty tears into the prehistoric river gathered around my chest, nothing seemed more immediate than the lost, motherless faun making his way beside the prince of the forest to an uncertain destiny.
Oh! The water splashed into my ears and I couldn’t seem to breathe. My shoulders felt heavier than the rest of my body. It was dramatic.
I’m serious now.
You have no idea.
“He’s still alive. He’s breathing.” Alex was looking down at me. Above her, the cloudless sky. I felt movement beneath me. “We did it. It worked. Look.”
I rose up on an unsteady elbow and saw the bed bobbing on its giant skis in the water behind us. Poor Kyle and Evan were there, too. They’d lashed themselves to the logs with their shirts. What were they thinking? Were they thinking at all?
I closed my eyes. I was exhausted.
“You sleep. We’re safe for now. Night is coming. I’ll take the first watch.”
As I drifted off, sleep coming up through my body like a light breeze, I heard a song. A man with a deep voice was singing, “Leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms . . .”
“Wake up. Wake up.”
I awoke with a start, let out a sharp howl. Alex put her hand over my mouth.
“Quiet.”
Faces in the moonlight. Eric and Joost looked spooked. Alex had a finger over her lips. She dropped her hand slowly from my mouth, then pointed back in the direction of the raft. What I saw was so chilling, so very odd that my skin crawled with cold, even in the tropical heat. A man hung in the air above the bed. He wore a heavy black coat and carried a big black book. He hung there like fluttering picture, a flag, his little eyes darting and his hard black hat the same shade as the dark. He had a sharp little smile and a white pointy chin. He was clearly evil. Where did Idaho find this villain — a floating preacher who haunted the night sky?
We lay on the raft, watching the specter, unable to do anything about him, unable to aid Madison as he hovered over her bed like nightmare kite. Several Mom-bats flickered in and out of his light. And then he sang: a low voice, vibrating deeply across the flicking waves.
“Leaning, leaning. Safe and secure from all alarms. Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.”
Alex gasped. I could see Eric’s eyes glittering. Terror. The light shed by the fiend and his moon and his owl cast a glow on us all. And the song he sang came close to stopping my heart. I closed my eyes.
“What have I to dread, what have I to fear? How bright the path grows from day to day. Leaning on the everlasting arms.”
Body frozen in fear, I opened my eyes, hoping against hope that he had flown away. He was still there, hanging over Madison like a helium-filled undertaker. He looked over at us and a corner of his mouth curled up. He knew we were there. Then he reached down with his long arm and seized the back of Evan’s shirt and hoisted him up. He held the boy like he had a rat by the tail and grinned a wide crazy smile. Then up he went, like a great moth, flitting into the stars.
We stared, speechless and shivering, at the dark sky that had enveloped Evan. Madison rocking on wet logs in the dark. Poor Kyle clinging to her bed, unaware of anything but numbing sadness. We could not speak; we did not know how much more we could bear.
“What was that thing?”
Alex exhaled. “We don’t know. It never gets closer than that. Anyone who has seen it any closer has left with it.”
Ms. Joost cleared her throat and leaned up on her elbows. “Well, boys and girls, maybe we oughta see what old thingamajig thinks.” She sniffed hard and wiped her nose on her arm, then pointed to the head bobbing sickly against her spine.
No one said anything. The prospect of hearing from that poor deformed creature was too much. Alex reached out and held Joost’s hand, then said as gently and warmly as possible, “Let’s hear what it has to say when the sun comes up.”
We were all relieved to hear this. Soon all of our hands were joined in the dark and we shut our eyes against the night, unable to sleep, but not willing to see any more night, either.
Put me down. I’m dizzy.
It’s strange to sleep. Sleep is a mysterious thing even in the simplest of people. When you’re sleepy, you seem to be getting sick, losing energy, losing clear thought, lying down out of weakness. Then you succumb to the weakness and what happens next resembles death. And then you dream. You abide in a world whose rules are hidden even from you — you who create it. And there I was, asleep on the raft. Dreaming of what? I don’t remember. I don’t have time to remember. I’m here with you, outside the possibility of rest or escape, trapped in service to you, ticking away with pointless, restless observation. I look at this scene and I have no way to make it normal anymore. Is that a weakness of mine? It’s my job really, to help you, my reader, in accepting things as real that aren’t. Most books try to get you to accept things that, at the very least, could be real — and that’s difficult enough, goodness knows — but here, in this book, nothing seems to be even trying to be real. Except, I would say, me. I’m here, I’m real. And to be honest, I’ve never been here before. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know what I’m doing. In some ways, I’m afraid this is the most real story I’ve ever written.
Someone was awake. Alex sat up, cross-legged at the front of the raft. A light sobbing came from her. She was crying.
“Alex?”
She wiped her cheek, drew her knees up under her chin and smiled at me.
“Are you crying?”
She nodded.
“What’s wrong?”
She stared at me for a moment. She stifled a laugh.
“Are we too close to Madison? Is that what it is?”
“No. No.”
“Then what is it?”
“Back where I live, up on the mountain, I have my own room. My mother wakes me up for school by pulling a string that goes up the stairs to a cow bell in the hall outside my room. Clang, bang, big old noisy clanging bell.” Alex went quiet. “I want to go home.”
I looked over, across the raft. Joost was snoring and the gagged head was drawing a horrible buzzing breath. Eric was watching us. Eric rolled onto his side.
“We are going home, right?” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
I didn’t know what to say. I said something.
“Eric, this whole world has nothing for us. It’s a terrible mistake. It can’t keep us from going home forever. I feel pretty strongly that this will all stop when we put Madison and Idaho back together. We might not even remember being here.”
Joost woke. She put both her feet up in the air. She tapped her muddy heels together. “There’s no place like home.”
Alex laughed and rolled on her back and did the same. Eric did it, too. I watched, remembering those ruby slippers. Dorothy had to say that she wanted to go home. She had to convince somebody that that’s all that she wanted. But the fact that she had to wear a specific pair of red shoes in order to actually get home scared me. What if she’d never found those slippers? Just a lonely girl, clutching her dog and crying in a field of flowers for eternity while a multicolor world of messed-up freaks moped around her. I liked Alex and Eric’s laughter. I liked the word “home.” It made the cold raft a little warmer. Behind us we dragged our ruby slippers, a girl in an icy bed who was sad enough to break the mind of this dangerous world to pieces.
What happens when
very big thi
ngs point out very small things?
I pulled the gag aside at sunrise. The story flowed from the blistered, sickly lips that hung from the face that hung from the spine of the crossing guard.
“Alex and Eric stand at the head of the makeshift raft, shivering in the early morning chill. Ms. Joost and the stranger sit, old and tired, their legs aching as the low sun touches them. Behind the raft bobs the pontooned bed in which lies the unfortunate Madison and, beneath her bed, the remaining boy, Kyle, a frozen wretch who clutches the bark with stiff blue hands. He has been sucked to her side like a cold tack to a magnet, unable to resist or even understand the miserable field that attracts him. Trilobites and heavy prehistoric slugs share the vessel with these still passengers. They sit on the bedclothes and the edges of the raft. There is a geological feature of the river that these travelers haven’t yet figured out: it is a circle. A large circle like a snake swallowing its tail, it is a line upon which you can only get to the place you are at. The circle is wide enough and the river rolls through such repetitive vegetation that a person traveling it might never discover its anomalous design. The landscape beyond the wide river track is equally unconventional. The terrain is largely dense foliage and hard dark rock, but here and there in odd patches sit the most startling incongruities: a tall plastic dome full of fluid that holds a perpetual fake snowstorm over a country cottage. At the apex of the dome sits a nest made of flexible iron where the hatchlings of a pterodactyl reside.”
“Circle! Circle! We’re going in a circle!” I pulled the gag tight on the narrator’s teeth. Its poor eyes rolled up and back, solid white before the lids fell. I stood. Shielding my eyes, I tried to see beyond. Even though the sky was tall and wide and the bush seemed to go on forever, I felt my chest tighten up with claustrophobia. I felt trapped.
Joost rolled over and sat up. “We’re on a donut. I vote we go down the donut hole.”
Eric secured the vines at the rear of the raft. He appeared angry. “Doesn’t matter. We don’t know what we’re doing. Do we, Tad?”
I spun around, hoping that I appeared wide-shouldered and commanding to him. He was right, of course, but as a leader, I couldn’t concede the negative.
“You’re damn right, Skippy. We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re the only people in this mess who are going anywhere.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, if we don’t accept being lost as a travel plan, then we just don’t move at all.”
Eric lowered his eyes and began looping a vine beneath his elbow and through his hand. A solemn mate. He moved me. He was brave.
Joost was smiling, but I think she was feverish and dreaming. She could not conceive of any real consequences. We were not people to her anymore. Just faces with signs on them. Happy. Unhappy. The head on her spine was ruining her mind. She still spoke, though. “Open the mouth. I like to hear what’s going on. Please! Open the mouth!”
I contemplated getting a second gag. I remembered Ms. Joost being such a solid and clearheaded woman. A trusted person. Remembered? I never really knew her. I invented her. The mixture of pain and confusion in her eyes now was difficult to watch. I didn’t write her that way. That would have been beyond my skills.
Alex pulled her feet quickly out of the water. She pointed to the river’s edge. “Something jumped in the water. Something big. Right there.”
We all turned to the spot where Alex pointed. Fast-moving water. Blue, deep and cold. Eric’s head snapped in the other direction.
“I heard something over there.”
I turned to check Madison. She seemed peaceful. Big brown bugs beat about her, but they didn’t seem to be interested in anything other than sunshine.
“Hey, boss,” Eric said. “Why don’t we have any weapons?”
He was right. I could have had them grab a stake, or a rock or something. I didn’t know what to say.
“There they are.” Alex pointed. Three long heads. Yellowish, with gray spots. Long snouts in the water. Alligators? Big ones. The heads were six feet long.
“Alligators.”
The first head rose up. And up. And up. It sat atop a long neck that cleared the water by ten feet.
“Not alligators!”
We hit the deck. Our only defense was to hide. The other two heads swooped up, water cascading down their scaly necks. The first head lunged like a striking snake. It snapped one of the vessel’s pontoons. Joost let out an involuntary whoop as the vine snapped and sailed up and over us. All three heads hissed in our direction and dove underwater.
“We have to get off! We have to get off here!”
Eric gestured to a boulder visible ahead. He gathered up the snapped vine. “I’m going to jump for that rock. When I get it secured, you follow along this vine. We’ve only got a small window. We have to be fast.”
Alex helped Joost get up. The poor woman was completely out of it. I nodded to Eric; I wanted to appear proud of him, fatherly. When he looked at me, I saw fear on his face. I grabbed his upper arm and felt his muscles.
“This, my boy, is where we add not-eaten to our list of accomplishments today.”
He laughed, then frowned, then disappeared — down into the dark dangerous water.
I wheeled back to help Alex with poor Ms. Joost. “We’ll each hold her on either side and free up a hand to grab with. Whoever grabs has to hold on for all three until —”
The beast’s head shot up beside us, its mouth turned to snatch us. I saw the irregular spikes of its teeth and the red-ribbed roof of its mouth just before we went tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee over the back.
The vine was in my hand and instantly the weight of the others yanked my arms and shoulders into a hard straight line with the current. My broken arm was empty of sensation and was now longer than the other. I didn’t know if Eric made it to the rock. I didn’t know if we were closer to the bottom or the surface of the river. I allowed the vine to slip, turning myself so that it flowed along my body and behind my knee. We were moving down it. A red ribbon passed my face. Blood. I was bleeding. I kicked with my free leg, trying to buoy us to the surface. Trying, too, to kick the claws of a beast coming at us from below.
The vine suddenly pulled in the other direction and we were stayed in the current. I tasted air all of a sudden, and saw sky. To my left, a long fat tail lifted and fell. To my right, Eric stood waist-deep in water, straining at the vine, bringing all of us to the riverbank. His shoulders appeared mighty from where I was. He saved our lives.
Monsters.
On shore we had no time to recover. One of the reptilian beasts was in the shallows of the far bank, watching us. Its massive head went up into the air. It called out in a deep, resonant bark.
I was reasonably intact, save for a rope cut along my shin. I helped Alex lift Joost out of the surf. Eric led the way as we ducked through dark jungle, rolling in the mud beneath barbed branches. I checked over my shoulder and saw that the beast had bounded into the river and with sinister speed was cutting through the current. Even if we were able to find cover, we could not get away from it. It knew where we were. It had us. As the beast rose up on the nearby bank, sheets of water falling from its bus-sized body, I spied a long log in the rocks beside us. I knew I couldn’t kill the beast, but I wouldn’t let it get us without a fight. A moment later I was standing before the creature, holding one end of the log while the other bobbed in the water. It was too heavy for me to lift the whole thing. The monster considered me with some curiosity. Then it opened its mouth, dazzling me with long rows of hazardous teeth. A tongue as big a canoe. I steeled myself, narrowing my shoulders in the hope that it would swallow me whole. A shadow fell over me. It wasn’t the beast’s shadow; it belonged to something bigger.
I glanced away from the lizard for a split-second and spotted the humongous head of a dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus rex, I thought, lunging toward the lizard
. I didn’t matter to this monster. The lizard flinched, trying to retreat from the massive jaws that crunched down on its neck. I turned to run and had to leap aside to avoid the colossal column of the T. Rex’s leg.
The T. Rex killed the lizard and our part of the river turned crimson, dappled with gore. The dinosaur threw his head back and roared a triumphal roar, the thrill of the kill. Its skull was the size of a dining car.
We watched for a moment, in awe, as it pulled pieces out of the lizard’s leathery hide and lobbed them up and into the back of its throat.
I felt something tugging on my knee. I thought that someone was trying to get my attention, but no, they were all watching the feasting dinosaur. My stomach shifted sickly. Something was sucking on my knee. When I bent my leg, I made out a purple mass. A monstrous leech. I dropped my leg back down. Not a normal leech. I felt the veins in my leg collapse slightly each time it sucked in.
“We have a problem.”
Alex looked back. “I think we’re safe here for the moment.”
“No. We really have to leave now.”
I stood. Two eel-sized leeches dangled from Eric’s sides. Alex’s eyes widened wildly and her face was still as prey.
“We have to leave here. I think the dinosaurs won’t see us if we’re quiet. Then we’ll get these off. Okay?”
Crying, Eric nodded. We crawled downstream, over tough roots, until we found a clearing of dry weeds. The leech on my knee acted like a pad. I felt the weight of others on my back. We sat, weeping, and peeled the sucking mouths from each other. Joost had four on her legs. Oncet escaped them. Alex, too, had none. We took fourteen of the slick palpating parasites from poor Eric. Blood streamed down his body from circular holes.
