by Sam Cheever
I shoved to my feet, dizziness making me stop and double over, breathing through the vertigo caused by standing too fast.
What’s wrong with me?
Maybe I’ve been poisoned by the manure, I thought, grimacing.
I’d certainly been repulsed by it.
The energy of the wall sizzled and snapped, but the sound was starting to fade. The shimmering barrier was growing fainter.
It was going away!
If it disappeared, I’d never find my way back to it. In pure desperation, I ran toward the wall and threw myself at it.
It was like hitting a bolt of lightning.
The energy flared against my skin, spitting angrily, and biting me like a million angry hornets, then it shoved me back with such force my feet left the ground and I flew backward.
I smacked against the grass again and skidded until I hit longer vegetation, which slowed me to a stop after a few more feet.
I lay there groaning, the soft sound of birds and bugs sifting through my mind.
I tried to tug my thoughts into some kind of order and get my limbs to work again. When I thought I’d pushed the dizziness back enough to move, I attempted to push myself upright.
My hand splashed into cool liquid.
I turned my head and peered through the tall grass, seeing the silvery sparkle of a body of water not five feet away.
A pond.
I could wash the cow feces off my hand!
A sense of calm came over me at the sight. It was so pretty. So inherently harmless. What had I been worried about? Why had I stressed being yanked into that dimension?
Wait? What was that terrible smell?
The long grasses rustled.
An aggressive snort filled the air.
And a pair of fierce, red eyes appeared between the moist strands of pond grass.
Pickled pond patties! I turned and started to run as the bull burst from the grass, head down and intention clear.
I was so infused with adrenaline when the massive head barreled into my backside I barely felt the pain. I was flying through the air, high above the pretty, sparkling pond, before I even realized I’d been hit.
I splashed down at the far end of the small pond, sinking into black, smelly sludge when I landed. I shoved at the muck but my hands just sank deeper, sliding over the snot-like surface and nearly sending me to my back in the nasty stuff. Panicking as my mind started to manufacture all the gross and treacherous stuff that might be living in the muck, I scrambled upward, pulling a few rarely-used muscles in the effort.
I stood there looking at the stinky mud coating my arms up to my elbows and my legs up to my calves. I didn’t even want to think about what my backside looked like.
“Ergh!” I groaned, flinging mud off my hands with a few hearty shakes. The black goo hit the water all around me with soft splatting sounds.
A not-too-distant snort had my head whipping up as I remembered the still-present danger standing by the pond. From a safe distance, the bull’s gaze looked less hostile and more confused. He was no doubt wondering how he’d gotten there.
He wasn’t alone in that. “Shoo! Go away. If you’re not going to be nice, you’re on your own.”
The big, stinky menace snorted again, stomped a massive hoof on the soft ground near the pond, and then turned away and started galloping.
“Good riddance,” I muttered, wiping my hands on the front of my jeans. I tried to step out of the pond, but my sneaker was stuck in the mire. I tugged harder and felt the shoe slipping off my foot. “Duck digits!” I exclaimed, reaching the end of my patience. I finally managed to tug my sneaker out, holding it away from my body as it dripped black goo.
Impatience made my stomach tight. I had a frog, a cow, a cat, and a hobgoblin to find. I sighed. “Oh, and a goat,” I told myself aloud. “The list just keeps growing.”
I peered off into the distance where the bull had gone. “I’m leaving you here,” I shouted after the retreating bull.
Rinsing my hands and arms in the water as best I could, I noticed that it was thicker than it should have been. It was also gray rather than clear or mud-colored. I pushed concern aside, figuring the pond was silty from me disturbing the muck around the edge. When I’d cleaned up as best I could, I straightened to look around for the first time. My eyes widened as I took in my surroundings. I’m not sure what I’d been anticipating, but whatever it was, the reality wasn’t anywhere close to my expectations.
The pond water that I’d thought was gray was actually silver. I stared down at it, hoping I hadn’t just washed my arms in some kind of molten metal, like Mercury or Silver. That was what it looked like. The trees which overhung the pond had pinkish bark. The knots along the trunk and branches were a darker pink that looked like purple polka dots from a distance.
The leaves of the trees were white, silver really, but they looked white in the sun.
I glanced toward the sky, realizing the sun was hotter than it should have been. My eyebrows climbed into my hairline. I was looking at two large, yellow globes of light and heat.
Two suns.
Okay. I’d definitely landed in Wonderland. I just hoped I’d find a helpful mad hatter to show me around the place.
“It’s about time you got here.”
I jerked spastically at the voice, my gaze sliding around the pond and seeing nobody.
“Hello?” the voice said, dripping with sarcasm. “Down here.”
I scoured the area around my feet with a wide gaze, expecting to see a talking turtle or a conversing carp.
I didn’t see him at first. He was just a pair of bulging black eyes nestled amongst the lily pads. Or, I guessed they were lilies. They had tiger stripes and oversized stigma at the centers that were a neon orange.
I narrowed my gaze on the frog. “Mr. Slimy? Is that you?”
The frog swam out of the flowers, hopping out of the water and landing on the warmed, flat surface of a rock which was half-buried in the muck. “Does a bull stink?”
“Yes,” I said, relief swamping me. “A bull definitely stinks.”
I crouched down and looked him over. He didn’t look injured, but I thought he might have grown some since I’d last seen him.
“It’s this water. Everything around it and inside it is bigger. You should see the garter snake that lives under that rock over there. He’s huge and he’s been looking at me like I’m dinner.” The frog eyed my backside. “You might want to keep your butt out of this water too.”
“Har de har,” I told him.
I was shocked by the idea that he could have grown. It had only been a few hours, hadn’t it? How was that possible?
“How do I know?” he responded saucily. “It just is.”
I fell backward onto my recently insulted butt and shook my head. “I’m dreaming, that’s it. I hit my head on a rock when the bull launched me and I’m still asleep.” I dug a rock out from under my mud-caked butt and flung it across the water. It skipped five times and then stopped, sitting on top of the thick silver water before sinking slowly out of view.
I bit the inside of my lip. “I’m not liking this water one bit.”
Slimy’s pudgy green form rippled as if he’d shrugged. “It’s not so bad. But I’m pretty sure I’ve been hearing the music from Jaws. I think something lives at the bottom. Something we probably don’t want to meet.”
I snatched him up and crab-walked away from the silvery liquid. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”
“Good, the frog said. I can’t wait to get home.”
“Not so fast, grasshopper,” I said.
Slimy got excited, hopping up and giving a happy little croak. “Where? I’m starving.”
“It was a movie reference,” I narrowed my gaze at him. “How can you be hungry? You’re surrounded by bugs and stuff. You should be fat and happy right now.”
Well, truth be told, he did have the fat part down.
“No fat-shaming, it’s mean.”
Says
the frog who just told me I had a big butt, I thought.
“Well, to be fair,” he said, “I merely insinuated it.”
I sighed. I so was not going to like this new mind-reading skill of the frog’s. Hopefully, it would go away when we got back.
“You don’t like it? What about me. It’s a dark and vastly empty place inside your head.”
“Hey!”
He chuckled, making me smile. “We can’t go home just yet. Mr. Wicked and Hobs are here somewhere, and Adelaide and Bessy.”
“Adelaide and Bessy?”
“A fainting goat and the cow we were hired to find.”
“We were hired to find a cow?”
“Yeah, that’s why we were in the barn when you got caught inside the wrinkle and ended up here. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“Barn? What barn?” Slimy asked.
Well, that answered that question. I looked him over carefully, wondering if he’d hit his head when he came through the wrinkle. He looked like my Mr. Slimy. Same squishy green form. Same blank black eyes.
“Hey!” the frog objected. trickle, trickle.
I sighed. “Same incontinence problems.”
“I’m not incontinent. Frogs pee where and when they want to. We resist the pressure to conform.”
“We’ll see how long you resist when I make you start wearing diapers.”
I felt his outrage in the trembling of his body.
“Yeah. So there.”
Trickle, trickle.
“Aaaaaahhhhh! You did that on purpose.”
He chuckled happily. “Never threaten a frog you’re holding in your hand. We have resources.”
“Four words, frog. Teeny, tiny amphibian diapers,” I set him on the ground and quickly rinsed my hands in the silvery water. The surface rippled nearby and something long broke through the ripples, a slanted pair of yellow eyes peering with dangerous hostility as I yanked my hands from the pond. “It’s time to go.”
We set off away from the pond, me trying to search the ground for tracks but continually getting distracted by the green birds in the trees above my head. Or the pale orange, deer-like creatures that had fangs and long tails like panthers. It didn’t take long for the heat of the double suns to turn me into a sweaty, uncomfortable wreck.
My feet were sore, the heated mud on my jeans was giving off a terrible stench, and my stomach was so empty it hurt.
I had no idea how long I’d been there, but I was pretty sure I’d missed lunch and maybe dinner. I was going to have to find something to eat pretty soon.
“I think we’re walking in circles,” sayeth the frog.
Sighing, I scrubbed my sweaty forehead with the back of one hand. “It’s highly probable. I have no sense of direction, and I’m in a world where everything looks the same.” I didn’t know if that was precisely true. Everything might just look the same because I was going in circles.
I dropped onto a large rock I was pretty sure I’d seen before and looked into the distance toward a spiky horizon of golden peaks that were also hauntingly familiar. Glancing up at the double suns, I realized they were lower in the purplish sky. “I think it’s getting late. What happens here at night?” I asked Slimy.
He stared into the distance, throat flaring and subsiding. He was either in deep thought, or his tiny little brain had seized up.
“Again with the innuendo about me having an empty head,” he lamented.
“Hey, you did it to me first.”
“Yeah? And I’m also not the boss of you.”
I rolled my eyes, realizing I was channeling Sebille. “Okay, listen. I get it. You’re snarky. I’m snarky. Everybody’s snarky. But two snarks do not make a right…”
Slimy blinked at me, looking perplexed.
“Or something like that. We need to start working together, or we’re never going to find Wicked…” The thought clogged my throat and made my eyes burn under a wash of unwelcome tears. I took a shaky breath. “I need to find him and Hobs. You want that, right?”
The frog sighed. “Of course. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out where they might be.”
I clamped down on a snarky rejoinder about his wracked brain and sniffled, dragging my sleeve under my nose. “Okay. Good. Have you come up with anything? Because I’m blanking here.”
“No. Sorry.”
He really did sound sorry, so I tightened my jaw against the desire to yell. “Okay. Well, I guess we’d better find a spot to spend the night. Then I need to find something to eat.” Slimy had been snatching bugs as we traveled, so I didn’t need to worry about him. Except that he probably needed water. “Do you smell water anywhere?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s not far. That would be a good place to sleep for the night.”
I nodded, agreeing but too tired and emotionally drained to even tell him so. “Lead the way.”
Slimy hit the glossy water as soon as we found it, swimming happily around before finding a floating log and settling down on top of it for the night. I was dying of thirst myself but I was about half afraid of drinking the thick, silvery stuff.
So to distract myself from my thirst, I set about gathering leaves for a bed in the protective shadow of two large rocks, beneath a pink and purple polka-dotted tree in case it rained. Or, heck, snowed. Who knew what the atmosphere of the current dimension was like?
A suitable resting place configured, I set off to find something to eat. In desperation, I sent my seeking energies out, hoping maybe to find a waffle maker artifact that came complete with already cooked waffles.
Hey, a girl can dream.
To my vast surprise, there was a distant chime of discovery. I headed in the direction it had sounded, finding nothing that looked like an artifact. “False find,” I murmured unhappily.
I hadn’t gone far when I found a tree that looked different from the water-loving trees around the ponds. It was shorter, its branches spreading out instead of up, and had brown bark that wasn’t smooth and silvery green leaves. Nestled within the leaves were what I assumed could only be pieces of fruit. The fruit was orange, oval in shape, and had bumpy skin. I picked one and smelled it hopefully. It smelled sort of like an orange, but when I peeled it, the meat was smooth like an apple. I gave it a tentative lick and found it sweet and juicy.
I waited a few minutes and, when it didn’t disintegrate my stomach or make me froth at the mouth, I picked several of the strange fruits and carried them back to my leafy bed.
They were delicious, the meat of the fruit was so juicy it alleviated my thirst while it filled my stomach. I tried not to think of the fact that they could be poisonous as I consumed the fourth one. If I didn’t eat or drink, I was going to die anyway so I told myself it was worth the risk.
As night fell and the nocturnal world woke and started to communicate through the dark, singing, croaking, rustling, and screaming into the night, I thought I was much more likely to die from something hungry beyond my little nest than I was from the fruit.
I tugged my coat closer around me and settled in, trying not to think of what might have happened to my friends after they came through the wrinkle.
I fell asleep to the last orange stain of twilight painting the sky. Even the belch of the bullfrogs and the occasional splash of something on the move beneath the weird water couldn’t keep me from falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
9
Dang His Wrinkled Soul
I didn’t open my eyes when I first woke up. I’d slept deeply when I’d slept, but I’d woken up several times throughout the night in response to strange noises. The broken sleep pattern had left me tired, despite the fact that the sun was already bright and hot, and I was pretty sure it was late morning.
It was the prickles between my shoulder blades that finally inspired me to open my eyes. And when I did, I jolted upward with a shriek, startling the man standing a few feet away, his eyes hidden behind a strange-looking pair of glasses. “Ya,” he said by way of greeting. “Halfun
?”
I scrambled backward until I came up against the rocks guarding my back. My mind still muzzy from sleep, it took me a minute to process the strange question. “What?”
His lips curved up in the corners.
Despite my pounding heart and the shortness of breath that came with panic, I took a beat to appreciate the strong nose, square chin and thick cap of…green…hair. “Hello.”
He nodded. “Ya.”
He was either a very agreeable person, or he was speaking to me in a different language.
Just great.
I pushed slowly to my feet.
He looked me over, his eyes narrowing at my muddied and rumpled state. Then his gaze found the orange peels from my meal the night before and the smile dropped away. He lifted his gaze, and I was pretty sure it would be filled with horror if I could see it behind the triangular blue glasses. But the lenses were too dark for me to see his eyes.
“What’s wrong? Is that fruit poisonous?”
The man didn’t answer. Instead, he hurried away from me and I followed. He walked briskly, with really long strides that seemed almost comical.
He covered the distance to the fruit tree very quickly, and I had to almost run to keep up. When he got there, he raced around the tree, carefully searching the ground underneath it. Then he stepped back and looked up at the sky, tugging the glasses off his face and spinning in a fast circle before turning back to me. “It is very dangerous to take the Seer’s gloff.”
“Gloff?” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know who the Seer is. I was hungry and…”
He shook his head, hurrying toward me.
I flinched back, lifting my piddly fists as if to punch him.
He looked shocked. Then amused. “You would strike me?”
“If you try to…erm…strike me first.”
The man frowned, replaced the glasses, and turned away, striding back to the pond as quickly as he’d come. I thought he was going to leave but he stopped by my little nest and grabbed up all the peels, then plucked some kind of long stick with a small metal head from where it had been leaning against a tree and began to dig in the soft soil near the pond.
